Deanna Pan and Emma Platoff

On one side are Congressional Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is up for reelection this November and supports Question 2, the teachers union-backed measure to repeal the state mandate requiring students to pass their 10th grade MCAS exams. Democratic Governor Maura Healey sits squarely in opposition — along with Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll and Attorney General Andrea Campbell.

“Eliminating the MCAS requirement means that we won’t have the same standard for schools across the state, so we’ll have different standards in Randolph than we will in Reading,” Healey said at a press conference Wednesday at Friends of the Children, a Roxbury-based youth advocacy nonprofit. “And that’s a system that I don’t believe sets us up for success.”

Mulligans are a thing in Wisconsin’s Evers era.

——-

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Noe Goldhaber

The Federalist receives funding from the Fund for American Studies Student Journalism Associationwhich “supports young conservative, libertarian and independent journalists who believe in restoring objectivity to the media.” Rothove said the Fund for American Studies has been advising the Federalist to ensure the newspaper “is a sustained effort and doesn’t just have three stories and then disappear again.”

Rothove cited Tripp Grebe, a UW-Madison student whose op-ed opposing defunding the police in 2020 was rejected by the Herald, as a motivation for starting an explicitly conservative newspaper. Grebe later had a column in the Cardinal and published the original opinion. 

“We’d have the ability to guarantee that, as long as you’re not writing about antisemitic conspiracy theory or something crazy, we will publish conservative students’ voices,” Rothove said. “Yes, we are in the minority on this campus. I think that if we have a publication for conservative students, it will kind of help build a network.”

Rothove said the Federalist plans to publish campus news on their Substack and hopes to have a print magazine twice a year. He said editorials will be conservative and news coverage will have some “conservative candy” but not “be super in your face, like Fox News openly right-wing, as much as we are just a non-liberal space.”

Current www.

Camus Excerpt

“James Madison, the author of the First Amendment, foresaw this exact situation of a government that ignores laws. In fact, and I didn’t know this until I had to research the speech, he was originally opposed to the Bill of Rights because he didn’t think paper guarantees could stop a corrupt government. So he thought bigger. He put together a document that was designed to inspire a certain personality type that would resist efforts to undo the experiment. And here a very important quality came play. James Madison was a great writer. The 44 words of the First Amendment were composed with extraordinary subtlety. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof or abridging the freedom of speech and here’s the alliterative part, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. What was he saying? The First Amendment didn’t confer rights to the people, it didn’t entrust government with guaranteeing them. Instead, the founders stood to the side the way an old country recognizes a new country, and they simply acknowledged an eternal truth, the freedom of the human mind. And this is what censors never understand, speech is free. Trying to stop it is like trying to catch butterflies with a hammer or stop a flood with a teaspoon. Choose your metaphor, but it’s a fool’s errand. You can apply as many rules as you want. You can threaten punishment. You can lock people up. The human mind always sets its own course, even in spite of itself. The poet William Ernest Henley explained about a century after the Constitution was written, he said, remember, it matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

Judith Davidoff & Liam Beran:

Soglin opened the news conference at the Park Hotel noting that the room contained an array of “unconnected” folks who are “connected by their concern for the city.” Audience members included former Alds. Nino Amato, Dave Ahrens and Dorothy Borchardt; Lisa Veldran, who led the city council office for 30 years; and Alex Saloutos, a real estate agent and staunch opponent of the referendum who recently started a blog where he addresses city issues.

Soglin, who has publicly denounced his various successors over the years, has ramped up his criticism of Rhodes-Conway and her administration this past year. In November 2023 he wrote a guest column for Isthmus arguing that Madison was facing a fiscal crisis “unprecedented in scope and depth.” And in recent months he has railed on Facebook against the referendum, charging that Rhodes-Conway and the council have been fiscally irresponsible and have failed to adequately engage lawmakers to increase state funding. But Wednesday’s news conference signaled that opponents were moving more aggressively and collectively to defeat the referendum in the final weeks before the vote. 

Sam Munger, Rhodes-Conway’s chief of staff, questioned whether Soglin, who lost a bid for reelection against Rhodes-Conway in 2019, was preparing for another run for mayor. 

Alex Saloutos:

Premature and Unjustified: Madison’s Referendum to Permanently Increase Property Taxes.

For example, the $23.2 million men’s homeless shelter and the $397.4 million BRT system were approved without operating budgets, including the sources of funds to operate them.

Inadequate oversight of human services grants. There is inadequate oversight of human services funding, with tens of millions of dollars disbursed to local providers each year without appropriate policies and sufficient monitoring of their use.

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Madison’s spending is rising more quickly than its main revenues.

David Blaska:

Even more reason to vote against both MMSD spending referenda: State government ended its fiscal year with $4.6 billion surplus — over $800 million more than expected.

And:

MMSD expends $20,380 on each student, well above the $16,345 average among Wisconsin’s public schools. 

•  Because Madison taxpayers approved seven referenda over the last 25 years to jack up operating revenue, the Wisconsin Policy Forum finds, “MMSD’s funding has still held up better than school funding across Wisconsin. In 2023, the revenue limit for Madison schools was 17.8% higher than the state average for all districts.”

• In fact, MMSD in 2024 has the second-highest revenue limit per pupil among the state’s 10 largest districts. “Compared to their peers at other large urban districts, MMSD students do not stand out for having higher needs,” according to the WI Policy Forum. 

• Madison does have the second-highest share of students learning English and the fourth-highest share of students of color among those ten districts, but enrolled the fourth-lowest rate of economically disadvantaged students and third-lowest rate of students with disabilities, according to Policy Forum authors Jason Stein and Tyler Byrnes.

• Public schools account for 49% of the $7,757 annual property tax for the median Madison residence. If approved, the average homeowner can expect to pay an extra $1,049 in property taxes as the spending is phased in over four years — and forever after.

Sort of related by Mike Bloomberg:

There are government boondoggles, and then there’s NASA’s Artemis program.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Abbey Machtig:

Schaefer said launching the pilot program is part of a yearslong effort to have all Madison schools use a consistent grading system. Elementary and middle schools have been using standards-based grading for several years.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Stéphane Lavertu, Foreword by: Aaron Churchill Chad L. Aldis

We learn two main things about the program:

• First, charter schools spent the supplemental funds in the classroom, most notably to boost teacher pay. As noted earlier, teacher salaries in charter schools have historically lagged. However, with the additional QCSSF dollars, qualifying charters were able to raise teacher pay by an impressive $8,276 per year on average. This allowed schools to retain more of their instructional staff, as indicated by a reduction in the number of first-year teachers as a percentage of their overall teaching staffs.
• Second, students attending qualifying schools made greater academic progress in math and reading than their counterparts attending non-QCSSF charters. Based on an analysis of the state’s value-added scores—a measure of pupil academic growth on state assessments—Dr. Lavertu’s most conservative estimates indicate that the supplemental dollars led to additional annual learning that is equivalent to twelve and fourteen extra days in math and reading, respectively. In addition to these achievement effects, he also finds that QCSSF reduced chronic absenteeism by 5.5 percentage points.

John McGinnis:

At its core, the progressive left’s attack on the Constitution undermines the very foundation of American democracy: the sovereignty of the people. As historian Gordon Wood has shown, the genius of American constitutionalism lies not merely in rejecting monarchy but in placing ultimate authority in the hands of the people, not their rulers. The Constitution represents this popular sovereignty by setting firm limits on government power. Allowing any branch of government—whether Congress, the presidency, or the judiciary—to rewrite these limits at will subverts this fundamental act of self-government.

Even more troubling, as political scientist Keith Whittington has observed, it denies the people their ongoing sovereignty—their right to amend the Constitution as they see fit. The Founders designed Article V to ensure that ultimate authority always rests with the people, not with their temporary agents. A Supreme Court that seeks to enforce the Constitution as written, thus safeguarding popular sovereignty against temporary political whims, naturally becomes the target of progressive ire.

Chris Edwards:

This report grades governors on their fiscal policies from a limited‐government perspective. Governors receiving an A are those who have cut taxes and spending the most, whereas governors receiving an F have increased taxes and spending the most.

Jennifer Berkshire:

At a rally this summer, Donald Trump touched on the topic of school spending. “We spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, and we’re at the bottom of every list,” he told a crowd in Philadelphia. Cut spending in half, Trump insisted, and the result will be “much better education.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s claim is wildly at odds with research on the connection between school spending and student achievement. That more spending, particularly on schools attended by the poorest students, leads to improved academic performance and graduate rates is now so well established that even former naysayers have conceded the point. The evidence regarding the damage done by slashing school spending is also considerable. Deep spending cuts result not in a system that looks like Norway, as Trump opined to the faithful, but in stunted academic and life outcomes for kids.

Twelve years ago, Kansas attempted a radical experiment in tax cutting. Under then-Gov. Sam Brownback, lawmakers slashed taxes on the state’s top earners and reduced the tax rate on some business profits to zero. As one think tankput it, “Kansas Tax Cuts Among Deepest State Tax Cuts Ever Enacted.” The cuts did not bring the promised “trickle-down” economic renaissance. As revenues plunged, lawmakers were forced to make deep cuts to spending, particularly for public schools. By 2016, Kansas had tumbled to near the bottom of state spending on public elementary and high schools.

Matt Taibbi:

On November 20, 2022, 85% of Stanford University’s Faculty Senate voted to condemn Dr. Scott Atlas, a former chief of radiology at the Stanford University Medical Center who was serving on President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. The Stanford faculty pilloried Atlas for questioning the efficacy of state-enforced lockdowns, face masks, and social distancing protocols, even arguing that his claims were “anathema to our community, our values and our belief that we should use knowledge for good.” A few weeks after the Faculty Senate rendered its verdict, the Academic Advisory Board of the University of California’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement held a meeting in which its members questioned whether Atlas’ COVID-19 pronouncements were protected by academic freedom.

A series of FOIA productions shed some light on what was discussed during that meeting. Dana Nelkin, a philosophy professor at UC San Diego, seemed to draw a distinction between academic freedom and cases in which faculty members promote ideas with the potential to harm the general public, especially in the context of a pandemic. This line of thinking was seconded by Suneil Koliwad, a medical professor at UC San Francisco, who argued that Atlas had “hit us very hard as scientists in the area of public health, from basic to clinical to epidemiological.”

John Robb:

Networked Politics

As a refresher, networks haven’t just changed how we communicate (see the GG Report; Packetized Media for more detail); 

• Exposure to networks has rewired our brains. We process information differently now. Specifically, we scan torrential information flows instead of reading or watching long-form books and broadcasts to uncover new, novel, or interesting information. 
• We use pattern matching to make sense of the packets of information we find through scanning. We can do this independently (few people) or rely on popular podcasters, X accounts, or YouTube personalities to pattern match for us (many people). 
• Overwhelmingly, people have opted to join large (tribal) networks engaged in collaborative pattern matching since it simplifies processing torrents of online information. Due to this adoption, collaborative networks are now in the process of rewiring our politics and our society.

Networked Tribalism

Joel Kotkin:

The discord among the American elites is far more pronounced now than in 2016 or 2020. This time, Donald Trump has gained more support from more tech and financial lords, notably the backing of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and America’s most accomplished entrepreneur. Some of this can be traced to Biden’s policies, which have led to the likes of Chase’s Jamie Dimon to praise Trump, something unexpected from President Obama’s “favourite banker”. Financial industries overwhelmingly favoured Biden in 2020, but now are slightly more oriented to the GOP – despite continued evidence that Trump remains ever more irrational and crude.

But Trump does best with those industries, like construction, manufacturing and agriculture, that actually make things. People who work with their hands – truck drivers, plumbers, electricians, oil-workers and farmers – generally favour the Republicans and so do the people who employ them. Trump’s business backers include those like Harold Hamm and Kelcy Warren, with ties to fossil fuel energy. The pro-Trump producer lobby also includes Musk, easily America’s most important industrialist, as well as others such as Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

One element is concern among producer companies that a Harris administration would follow the model she championed in California. The Golden State imposes environmental and labour laws that have accelerated the state’s significant de-industrialisation and the immiseration of swathes of its population.

But Harris is still winning the daimyo wars. As has occurred throughout her career, she continues to harvest big money from the tech oligarchy. The industry helped her raise four times as much as Trump in August, and gathered in over $1 billion, two to three times Trump.

These are the very people who Teamsters President Sean O’Brien claims have “bought and paid” for the Democratic Party. Certainly, Harris’ ties to the oligarchy can hardly be ignored. She even reportedly received expert coaching for her strong debate performance – clearly the highlight of her otherwise vacuous campaign – from a top Google attorney litigating an anti-trust case against her own administration. This same company’s dominant search engine also appears to do its best to steer people to view Harris favourably, according to a study by the Media Research Center.

Samuel Velasco:

There was just one wrinkle: Pasten had no exam to give his students. He instead had them write an essay on whatever topic they wanted. “This turned out to result in very high-quality work,” he said.

Pasten submitted his proof to Inventiones Mathematicae, one of math’s preeminent journals, where it was accepted in just over a month — the blink of an eye by the field’s usual publication standards. “It’s a lovely advance on something that hasn’t seen much progress for essentially 100 years,” said Cameron Stewartof the University of Waterloo. Mathematicians hope it will translate into advances on related number sequences, too.

Pasten’s technique also enabled him to make progress on certain cases of the abc conjecture, yet another question that deals with the interplay between addition and multiplication, and one of the most famous — and controversial — unsolved problems in mathematics. “New (and correct) ideas in this area have been scarce,” Granville wrote in an email. “The originality and promise of his methods deserve wide attention.”

Francesca Block:

“Every lesson plan is a political document, and every classroom interaction a political statement,” the guide reads. 

El-Mekki’s nonprofit boasts more than $19.5 million in assets, boosted by funders including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated over $1.4 million between 2020 and 2021, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which gave over $1.1 million in 2022, according to public tax filings. Other backers include NBC Universal, Nike, the Bezos Family Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania School of Education, and dozens more. In 2023 alone, CBED trained more than 1,700 educators. In their most recent tax filing from 2023, El-Mekki drew a salary of $233,410 from the organization.

“He started up this organization, which on paper sounds like a really wonderful endeavor, getting more black teachers in the classroom,” said Dr. Mika Hackner, a senior research associate at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, which drafted a report on El-Mekki’s extremist views and activism that she shared with The Free Press. “But if you scratch beneath the surface—not even beneath the surface, it’s on their website—he’s propagating some pretty dangerous and divisive ideas.” 

El-Mekki, she added, is “bringing in segregation by a different and more socially and politically acceptable name.” 

Nicholas Confessore:

“It’s this gotcha culture they have created on campus… It’s like giving a bunch of 6-year-olds Tasers.”

Steve McGuire:

“The rote incantations of a state religion.”

This is an incredible exposé of academic DEI.

It confirms so many things critics of DEI have been saying for years.

Better late than never, NYT!

i/o

— Almost 250 people are employed in DEI, and its budget could pay the in-state tuition of nearly 1,800 students

Sasha:

If someone wanted to find a way to destroy American Universities, they wouldn’t be able to find a better too than D.E.I.

Abbey Machtig:

This school year, the district will get about $61.3 million from the state, according to DPI’s final calculations. Last school year, Madison schools received about $37.9 million.

Any increase in state aid typically lessens the burden on local property taxpayers. In Wisconsin’s complex school finance system, the two factors are directly related: When state aid increases, less money needs to come from local taxpayers. But when state aid declines, taxes are likely to go up.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

epoch ai:

In recent years, the capabilities of AI models have significantly improved. Our research suggests that this growth in computational resources accounts for a significant portion of AI performance improvements.¹ The consistent and predictable improvements from scaling have led AI labs to aggressively expand the scale of training, with training compute expanding at a rate of approximately 4x per year.

To put this 4x annual growth in AI training compute into perspective, it outpaces even some of the fastest technological expansions in recent history. It surpasses the peak growth rates of mobile phone adoption (2x/year, 1980-1987), solar energy capacity installation (1.5x/year, 2001-2010), and human genome sequencing (3.3x/year, 2008-2015).

Katie Langin:

Going up for tenure and promotion can be nerve-wracking for any academic. It’s supposedly an unbiased evaluation of a scholar’s work, but other dynamics can come into play. Now, new research highlights the impact of one of those factors: race. Among more than 1500 tenure and promotion decisions at five U.S. research-intensive universities, Black and Hispanic faculty members received more negative votes than their equally productive white and Asian colleagues.

It’s “some of the most robust evidence of racial bias in promotion and tenure,” says Damani White-Lewis, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied racial disparities in academia but wasn’t involved in the new research. “Now that we have actual data across multiple institutions, it makes for a more compelling case that we need to laser in on this.”

Data on tenure and promotion committee votes are notoriously difficult to come by, as institutions treat them as highly confidential. So, the researchers behind the new study, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, partnered with administrators at five U.S. universities whose offices anonymized and compiled records of tenure and promotion decisions in all disciplines between 2015 and 2022. “That gave us enough of a sample size where we can look at racial disparities,” says author Juan Madera, a professor at the University of Houston.

FIRE:

The United States Supreme Court throws out the Fifth Circuit’s decision dismissing citizen journalist Priscilla Villarreal’s lawsuit and sends it back for review.

This has major implications for Americans’ First Amendment rights.

Beverly Hirtle and Anna Kovner

We analyze 6,400 letters of recommendation for more than 2,200 economics and finance Ph.D. graduates from 2018 to 2021. Letter text varies significantly by field of interest, with significantly less positive and shorter letters for Macroeconomics and Finance candidates. Letters for female and Black or Hispanic job candidates are weaker in some dimensions, while letters for Asian candidates are notably less positive overall. We introduce a new measure of letter quality capturing candidates that are recommended to “top” departments. Female, Asian, and Black or Hispanic candidates are all less likely to be recommended to top academic departments, even after controlling for other letter characteristics. Finally, we examine early career outcomes and find that letter characteristics, especially a “top” recommendation have meaningful effects on initial job placements and journal publications.

More.

Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh Hooman Shahrokhi, Oncel Tuzel Samy Bengio Mehrdad Farajtabar:

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their formal
reasoning capabilities, particularly in mathematics. The GSM8K benchmark is widely used to assess the mathematical reasoning of models on grade-school-level questions. While the performance of LLMs on GSM8K has significantly improved in recent years, it remains unclear whether their mathematical reasoning capabilities have genuinely advanced, raising questions about the reliability of the reported metrics. To address these concerns, we conduct a large-scale study on several state-of-the-art open and closed models. To overcome the limitations of existing evaluations, we introduce GSM-Symbolic, an improved benchmark created from symbolic templates that allow for the generation of a diverse set of questions. GSM-Symbolic enables more controllable evaluations, providing key insights and more reliable metrics for measuring the reasoning capabilities of models.Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit noticeable variance when responding to different instantiations of the same question. Specifically, the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered in the GSM-Symbolic benchmark. Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and demonstrate that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases. We hypothesize that this decline is due to the fact that current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data. When we add a single clause that appears relevant to the question, we observe significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the added clause does not contribute to the reasoning chain needed to reach the final answer. Overall, our work provides a more nuanced understanding of LLMs’ capabilities and limitations in mathematical reasoning

Mark Dent:

When Kathy Alexander started managing a lunch program at a Vermont school with 200 children in the late 1990s, she was shocked by how much the cafeteria felt like a business.

Her staff spent significant amounts of time on paperwork to track students’ incomes and collected money from kids at a cash register. They faced grueling decisions over whether they should raise prices and calculated the debts of families who barely missed out on eligibility for discounted meals yet struggled to pay the full price.

“Within a year I said to myself, ‘This is insane.’ What is happening? Why do I have to run this business in this school?” Alexander says.

Decades later, the model for Alexander, who’s now the director of the food service cooperative in the Mt. Abraham United School District, has changed. Vermont is one of eight states providing universal free meals to public K-12 students rather than charging different price points based on income. In lieu of onerous administrative work, Alexander’s staff spends more time brainstorming how to maximize federal dollars to support the program and trying out new recipes for pulled pork flatbread with pineapple sauce and Vietnamese rice bowls.

She wants universal free lunch to “sweep the country.”

Corrine Hess:

But DPI spokesperson Chris Bucher said the department and MPS made sure all accounting errors were corrected to minimize any significant further adjustments. The state deducted $42.6 million in state aid from its payment to the district last month due to district reporting errors in the 2022-23 school year.

“This took a tremendous amount of time, energy, and effort from both the DPI and MPS, and we both believe we are in a good place with the 2023-24 data,” Bucher said. “We don’t anticipate any significant future adjustments at this time.”

MPS will receive about 7.7 percent less in general state aid this year. The total amount is $587.1 million. 

Of 421 districts, two-thirds will receive more aid for 2024-25 than in 2023-24, while 137 districts will receive less. 

General school aids are paid in four installments during the school year and are part of a complex school district budgeting formula that also includes property taxes and federal dollars. 

Notes and links on the Foundation for Madison Public Schools.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Will Flanders:

A typical Wisconsin school district now gets more than $17,900 per student. In a class of 20 kids, that’s $358,000 of taxpayer money. If a district can’t “keep the lights on” for that, it’s more than just MPS who’s cooking the books.

More.

Scott Manley:

We spend more per kid than the tuition cost to attend UW Madison. Maybe schools should stop spending the money on non-instructional staff, and instead focus the money on classrooms and teachers.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Austin Berg:

“When we first wrote to your clients on October 2, we extended the opportunity to avoid litigation by publishing the audits to members, consistent with CTU’s Constitution. One week later, you requested the names of our clients, ostensibly to confirm their membership. As a professional courtesy, we complied.”

“The retaliation from CTU against our clients was swift. That evening—during a delegate meeting where one of our clients was introduced as a candidate for the Pension Board—CTU’s President attacked our clients by name, associating them with ‘Project 2025’ and baselessly labeling them as ‘extreme right wing.’”

“Most concerningly, it is our understanding from a whistleblower that, on Friday, one of our client’s in-school union reps received an ‘apoplectic’ call from someone at CTU insisting that they try to stop our client from pursuing this lawsuit. If true, this represents a drastic escalation of CTU’s intimidation tactics.”

More.

CTU spends just 17 cents on representing teachers.

They spend the rest on administration, politics and other union leadership priorities.

Kayla Huynh

Less is clear with the district’s plans for the $100 million referendum, which would fund day-to-day operating costs, such as salaries and programs. Approving this referendum alone would hike property taxes on the average home by over $300 in the first year, the district estimates. 

By 2028, the operations referendum would permanently raise the average homeowner’s property taxes by nearly $1,050 annually. That cost could be on top of hundreds of dollars annually for the district’s facilities referendum and a $22 million property tax increase sought by the city government. 

On Sept. 30, the Cap Times asked district spokesman Ian Folger to further clarify the district’s goals for the operating referendum. Folger said the district is currently using one-time sources of funding to pay for about $47 million in operating costs, such as staff salaries. Money from the referendum could fund those expenses, he said.

The referendum could also help fund recent pay raises approved by the School Board. District staff received a 2.06% increase to their base wages under a deal negotiated in September between the district and the teachers’ union. Under that agreement, employees would receive another 2.06% pay bump if the $100 million referendum passes.

The total increase would be 4.12% — the maximum base wage increase allowed by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. Folger previously told the Cap Times that the total increase would cost the district nearly $13.3 million.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Glenn Reynolds:

America is facing a competence gap as both government agencies and private companies repeatedly reveal a laughable inability to perform their basic tasks.

The Secret Service, whose multiple failures in securing former President Donald Trump’s July rally in Butler, Pa., are frankly hard to believe at this point, is one example. (Nor is the Butler event the Secret Service’s first embarrassment.)

So is the US Navy, whose ships keep colliding and catching fire.

American military engineers, who 80 years ago built entire floating harbors to support the D-Day invasion in Europe, now can’t install a workable floating pier in Gaza.  

A federal program to build EV charging stations around the country is floundering. Nearly three years after legislation was signed to create 50,000 charging stations, only seven had been built —unimpressive results for $7.5 billion.

Patrick Eddington and James Craven:

Growing police power has gravely distorted interactions between cops and citizens. Officers arrive with not just a gun and body armor but with wide-ranging legal immunities and both the privilege and training to lie to you during questioning.

Now they want to force you to unlock your phone.

The amount of personal data we keep on our smartphones is almost immeasurable, a reality the Supreme Court recognized in 2014 when it ruled that police must comply with the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement to search your device. But your phone has a simpler safeguard: a password that, under the Fifth Amendment, you shouldn’t have to reveal unless the government overcomes your right against self-incrimination.

Christopher Rufo:

Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:

In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade ninegraduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District.Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.

There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:

High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.

Marc Benioff

Despite multiple requests, TIME has not been granted an interview with Kamala Harris—unlike every other Presidential candidate. We believe in transparency and publish each interview in full. Why isn’t the Vice President engaging with the public on the same level? #TrustMatters #TransparencyMatters #Leadership

More.

Hunter Gehlbach , Carly D. Robinson, Angus Fletcher

 individuals navigate perspectives and attitudes that diverge from their own affects an array of interpersonal outcomes from the health of marriages to the unfolding of international conflicts. The finesse with which people negotiate these differing perceptions depends critically upon their tacit assumptions—e.g., in the bias of naïve realism people assume that their subjective construal of a situation represents objective truth. The present study adds an important assumption to this list of biases: the illusion of information adequacy. Specifically, because individuals rarely pause to consider what information they may be missing, they assume that the cross-section of relevant information to which they are privy is sufficient to adequately understand the situation. Participants in our preregistered study (N = 1261) responded to a hypothetical scenario in which control participants received full information and treatment participants received approximately half of that same information. We found that treatment participants assumed that they possessed comparably adequate information and presumed that they were just as competent to make thoughtful decisions based on that information. Participants’ decisions were heavily influenced by which cross-section of information they received. Finally, participants believed that most other people would make a similar decision to the one they made. We discuss the implications in the context of naïve realism and other biases that implicate how people navigate differences of perspective.

Roy H. Perlis, MD, M; Katherine Ognyanova, PhD4; Ata Uslu, MS

Question  How did trust in physicians and hospitals change during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Findings  In every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443 455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the US, trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5% in April 2020 to 40.1% in January 2024. Individuals with lower levels of trust were less likely to have been vaccinated or received boosters for COVID-19.

Meaning  This study suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic has been associated with a continuing decrease in trust in physicians and hospitals, which may necessitate strategies to rebuild that trust to achieve public health priorities.

Kelly Meyerhofer and Cleo Krejici:

The Wisconsin Technical College System has its own board and administrative staff. However, the system office said it does not keep a centralized database with salary information on its 16 presidents.

The Journal Sentinel collected salary information from technical colleges through public records requests to get a sense of compensation among public higher education leaders in Wisconsin in the 2023-24 school year.

Here’s six takeaways from our analysis:

Average technical college president compensation package outpaces regional UW chancellors

UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee are classified as Research 1 institutions, meaning their missions are not only to educate students with four-year degrees, master’s and doctorates, but to produce a high level of research. Remove both universities from the picture, and there are 11 comprehensive UW four-year universities remaining, with an average chancellor compensation package of $318,702.

WILL:

A calculator with current and future property taxes – notwithstanding other, ongoing assessment and mill rate increases.

Much more on Madison’s well funded K-12 $607,000,000 Fall 2024 tax & $pending increase referendums, here.

More.

A summary.

James Gordon:

The school has already raised $200 million in donations from several billionaires and high-profile figures including real-estate developer and GOP donor Harlan Crow and trader Jeff Yass who made a substantial $35 million contribution, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The fledgling school aims to counter what its backers see as rejecting Western values and lacking ideological diversity at traditional universities.

UATX’s mission is bold: to foster open debate, academic freedom, and a ‘fearless pursuit of truth,’ while blending classical education with entrepreneurial spirit. 

More.

Daniel Buck:

In a few years, the greatest disparity in American education won’t be rich versus poor or black versus white but low-tech versus high-tech schools. Affluent families will cough up tuition to secure a school with paper and pencils, in-person discussions, and hard-copy books for their children. Meanwhile, the rest of American children will spend their school days clicking through online learning platforms.

Indeed, surveys find that students already spend at least one hour of class time on screens per day, with 27 percent of students spending five hours staring into Chromebooks and iPads at school. Seeing as the average school day …

Te-ping Chen:

Aaron Rice has two logos tattooed on his left leg: one from the plumbing business he co-founded more than a decade ago, and another from the private-equity-backed company that recently bought it.   

Few businesses are as vital to their customers as local plumbing, heating or air-conditioning companies—especially in places like Tucson, Ariz., where Rice works and residents sweltered in 100-degree heat most days this summer.

David Brooks:

The former Magdalen College of Liberal Arts in Warner, which closed in May after 50 years as the state’s smallest college, is up for sale. The campus with eight buildings on 129 acres was put on the market this week for $5.5 million.

The sale, which comes as no surprise, raises a lot of possibilities. For example, the campus was mentioned at a recent meeting of the Warner Housing Advisory Committee as a possible location for senior housing since it includes a cafeteria, kitchen and activity area. The large parcel of land at the foot of Mount Kearsarge could prove particularly attractive to developers.

There is no set outcome for what happens when a rural college closes. The former Chester College in southeast New Hampshire shut in 2012 and is now a private boarding school; the owner of Daniel Webster College in Nashua, which closed in 2017, rents out several buildings to businesses; and Southern Vermont College, which closed in 2019, is going to become a hotel.

Magdalen College was founded in 1973 by three lay members of the Catholic church to impart core religious values and teach a rigorous liberal arts education. It operated in a former motel in Bedford until a wealthy donor allowed it to move to the Warner campus in 1991.

More.

Nadya Williams

Multiple recent stories offered more signs of what I consider to be an unfolding civilizational decline. First, a student in Hartford, CT, who had attended local public schools from age six, graduated from high school without knowing how to read or write. At all. She had used speech-to-text software to write her papers. After graduating on the honor roll, she is now enrolled at the University of Connecticut. She is also suing her former school district for educational neglect.

The same week in the Atlantic, Rose Horowitch reported on “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” Professors she interviewed at top institutions—Columbia, Princeton, UVA—reported the same experience. Students’ ability to read complete books, cover to cover, has been eroded to nothing over the past two decades. Because some students—notably, at public middle and high schools—have not had the experience of reading books in their entirety, they arrive at college without possessing this skill. Some sheepishly reported to professors that they’ve never read a book in full before.

Rounding up the trinity, also the same week, a menswear editor on social media commented on the poor aesthetic of overcrowded home libraries in small spaces—such as those in which urban dwellers often find themselves: “In places where housing costs have skyrocketed, living with a giant collection of books can be unpleasant. At some point, I switched to digital where possible.”

Wisconsin State Journal:

But taxpayers deserve a more detailed accounting of how the extra $100 million would be spent. The district has been increasing staff despite flat enrollment and a projection for declining enrollment. Moreover, it already has a higher concentration of teachers and staff — one employee for every 6.4 students — than surrounding districts, according to the state Department of Public Instruction. 

Such a large request for additional taxing authority for operations should come with specific goals for achievement, such as higher test scores for students of color. Despite lots of effort and positions to improve academic outcomes for students of color over decades, scores on reading and math remain low.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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 J Stern:

“I want to flag one case that’s really funny to me, Nuclear Regulatory Commission v. Texas. It’s sort of like the chickens coming home to roost…”
“… for the Supreme Court. A few years ago, the court made up the ‘major questions doctrine,’ the principle that when an agency makes a decision that involves a ‘major question,’ courts have a free-floating veto to block it. Well, the 5th Circuit used this doctrine to blow up the entire system of nuclear waste storage in this country, possibly forever…. The 5th Circuit sided with Texas in this case, declaring that the commission is actually powerless to grant licenses for the temporary storage of nuclear waste offsite from the plant… not because federal law says the commission can’t do that… [but because] temporary storage is a ‘major question’ because it involves nuclear material. And… Congress has to come in and authorize it even more clearly….Because the question ‘has been hotly politically contested for over a half century.'”

More.

Andrew Billen:

Sir Jonathan Bate, Britain’s foremost Shakespeare scholar and a former Oxford college head, met scepticism this week when he insisted on a radio interview that while once his students would read three Dickens novels in a week, they now struggled to plough through one in three weeks.

A fellow Oxford academic wrote to The Times to point out that this feat would require 13 hours of concentrated reading a day. Speaking on Zoom from America, where he has taught since leaving his post at Worcester College, Oxford, in 2019, Bate admits that he was “partly exaggerating for rhetorical effect”.

“When I was at Cambridge only swots like me and Stephen Fry actually read all the books,” he said.

Nevertheless, during his eight years as provost of Worcester, he noticed a decline. “I talked to pretty well every student in the course about their time there, and there’s no doubt that they’d read a lot less,” he added.

Matthew Stanmyre

With a salary of $301,600, Teresa Segarra, 79, is the state’s fourth-highest paid superintendent, outearning the leaders of nearly 600 other school districts, according to the state’s salary database. She made an additional $22,036 for the fiscal year ending June 2023, tax filings show, pushing her total compensation to $323,636.

Jose Segarra, 79, earns $257,802 as the school’s business administrator, records show. Despite serving in a lesser capacity, he makes more than all but 22 superintendents in New Jersey, according to the state’s database.

Maria L. Varisco-Rogers Charter School, a kindergarten through eighth grade institution in Newark’s North Ward, has 570 total students. About 93% of its students are economically disadvantaged.

Tyler Cowen Summary:

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff (Committee), which oversees federal science agencies including NSF, analyzed 32,198 Prime Award grants NSF awarded to 2,443 different entities with project start dates between January 2021 and April 2024.

Rupa Subramanya

“Many policy decisions are ‘science-informed,’ meaning that factors in addition to science shape decision-making,” the Biden task force wrote. “These factors may include financial, budget, institutional, cultural, legal, or equity considerations that may outweigh scientific factors alone.” Going forward, the task force said, such “considerations” should play an important role in NSF grant decisions. 

An NSF spokesperson did not specifically address the committee’s report when I reached out. But they said the “NSF’s merit review process has two criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts—and is the global gold standard for evaluating scientific proposals.” Their statement continued, “NSF will continue to emphasize the importance of the broader impacts criterion in the merit review process.”

The GOP members’ report said it searched for grant applications that used a variety of terms associated with social justice, gender, race, environmental justice, and individuals belonging to underrepresented groups. Some of the grant applications that received funding showed up in more than one category. 

Vladimir Kogan:

Chicago’s troubled school district has made national headlines recently—from the mass resignation of its appointed school board, which opposed the mayor’s efforts to borrow nearly $300 million at ruinous rates to give the teachers union a sweetheart contract, to the likely ousterof the district’s superintendent. But the city has also become a powerful symbol in the brewing battles over rightsizing efforts in the face of declining enrollment and expiring federal pandemic aid.

A decade ago, Chicago closed approximately fifty schools, one of the largest consolidation efforts in recent memory, and the consequences continue to be disputed. Much of this debate engages in selective cherry-picking of data and misleading interpretations of the evidence, giving rise to confusion about what (if any) lessons district leaders across the country should learn from Chicago’s experience.

A recent article by Thomas Toch and Maureen Kelleher, leaders of Georgetown University think tank FutureEd, suffers from many of the same problems. To understand the many things the authors get wrong about Chicago—as well as the few points they get right—it is important to examine the most important claims in their piece.

Gregg Easterbrook:

Does The Atlantic seriously think political lies are a brand new development? It’s depressing to see the top of journalism denouncing the First Amendment.

Chalk & Talk:

In this first episode of a two-part series, math professor Anna Stokke sits down with Dr. Brian Poncy, a school psychology professor at Oklahoma State University, who specializes in math interventions. His extensive research on basic fact fluency led to the development of a free math program called M.I.N.D, aimed at improving numeracy and computational skills.

In the episode, Brian stresses that we have a basic fact crisis where many students struggle with basic fact fluency, affecting their overall math proficiency. They discuss his research and effective strategies for teaching basic facts and computational skills.

Christopher Rufo:

The story begins in 2021, when the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into law, allocating $3.8 billion in federal funds to Colorado. The City of Denver, which had declareditself a “welcoming city” to migrants, drew on this reservoir of money to launch its Emergency Migrant Response resettlement program, with the goal of housing and providing services to a massive flow of migrants.

Denver, in turn, signed multimillion-dollar contracts with two local NGOs, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo, to provide housing and services to more than 8,000 predominantly Venezuelan migrants. These NGOs are run, respectively, by Yoli Casas and Marielena Suarez, who, according to professional biographies, do not appear to have previous experience in large-scale migrant resettlement.

Nevertheless, the city flooded them with cash. According to public records, between 2023 and 2024, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo received $4.8 million and $774,000, respectively; much of this funding came from the Migrant Support Grant, which was funded by ARPA. Then, in 2024, ViVe secured an extra $10.4 million across three contracts, while Papagayo received $2.9 million from a single contract to serve migrants; two of those five contracts were awarded to implement the Denver Asylum Seekers Program, which promised six months of rental assistance to nearly 1,000 migrants.

It’s unconscionable that 300k migrant children who were trafficked across the border are now unaccounted-for.

UBL

Last month, the UBL announced that it will deselect an extensive collection of foreign dissertations. We are happy to report now that The Internet Archive will be taking over this collection.

The dissertations were originally part of an exchange programme between (mostly European) universities until the year 2004 but were never catalogued on arrival. As Leiden University Libraries has limited space for growth in its stacks, it decided to deselect these dissertations, so that 3.2 km could be freed up for new acquisitions. The universities where these dissertations originally were defended informed UBL that they still have the dissertations and were not interested in receiving back the Leiden copy. The Internet Archive will now take over this collection from the UBL, and will take care of its future preservation and access. The UBL is pleased that The Internet Archive is able to give this collection of foreign dissertations a second life.

Eugene Volokh:

I don’t think that’s consistent with the First Amendment, even if limited to knowingly false statements of fact. The Supreme Court has held that “prosecutions for libel on government have [no] place in the American system of jurisprudence,” regardless of whether the government thinks it can show that the statements are knowingly false: Even outright lies that damage the government’s reputation are thus constitutionally protected. Likewise, the 3-Justice dissent in U.S. v. Alvarez concluded that,

Parker Baxter Michael J. Petrilli Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. David Griffith:

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Parker Baxter, Director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at the University of Colorado, joins Mike and David to discuss his new report on the impact of Denver’s education reforms. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber shares a RAND survey on teachers’ experiences with school violence and lockdown drills.

Abbey Machtig:

In retribution for speaking publicly, MTI says, Terrell and Torres both submitted workplace bullying and discrimination paperwork with the Madison School District against all but one current MTI member who spoke at the board meeting. 

The employment relations complaint alleges that Terrell filed this paperwork “to influence the outcome” of the investigation into her behavior. The same staff who spoke out have now been subject to “prosecutorial interrogations” by the district staff, according to the MTI complaint.

District employees can be disciplined or fired if found to be in violation of the workplace bullying or discrimination policies. As a result, the employment relations complaint also names the Madison School District.

Terrell and Torres denied the allegations in their responses to the complaint, but confirmed they did submit bullying and discrimination complaints with the school district. 

Governor.Virginia.gov

Governor Glenn Youngkin, after being notified this afternoon that the Biden-Harris Department of Justice was filing a lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Virginia, released the following statement: 

“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote. Virginians – and Americans – will see this for exactly what it is: a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy. With the support of our Attorney General, we will defend these commonsense steps, that we are legally required to take, with every resource available to us. Virginia’s election will be secure and fair, and I will not stand idly by as this politically motivated action tries to interfere in our elections, period.”

More.

In 2006, then Democrat Gov. Tim Kaine signed into law a common sense bill requiring Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls. It was the law then and it REMAINS the law now.

Dave Cieslewicz

And the racial achievement gap in Madison was far worse than the rest of the state. Statewide the gaps were 43% for English and 50% for math. About 60% of white students were proficient in English compared to 17% of Black students. About 64% of white students were proficient or better in math while only 14% of Black students achieved that level. 

But in Madison the gaps were 60% for English and 62% for math because the achievement levels were higher for white students than the state average and lower for Black students. About 74% of white students in MMSD were proficient in English compared to only 14% of Black students. Nearly 72% of white MMSD students scored proficient or better in math while only 10% of Black students were proficient. 

And this despite the fact that for over a decade MMSD has been obsessed with the racial achievement gap. And now the district wants Madison taxpayers to pour in another $607 million in two referendums on the November ballot. They want to exceed state taxing limits by that much while they promise no changes in performance. 

School board member Ali Muldrow spoke for the board when she claimed that the reason for Black underachievement was the district’s suspension policy. It’s true that far more Black students get suspended than white students, But Muldrow’s been on the board for six years and her views are echoed by the other board members. If she doesn’t like the suspension policy why didn’t she change it?

Jose Luis Espert:

No bruto. Hay que ahorrar y ahorrar toda la plata que se pueda en el Estado para que algún día se puedan eliminar (cheque y retenciones, etc.) impuestos y bajar otros (Ganancias, IVA, etc.) para que la gente deje de ser un esclavo impositivo. Mas libertad, no más gasto público.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

America’s Future:

If left as is, the rule sets the stage for the federal government to create a national database filled with the private data of Americans, enabling our government to restrict the movement of citizens, regulate and monitor everyday purchases, and even set about implementing a social credit system not unlike the system imposed in Communist China – a system capable of evaluating how their citizens live their lives, judging the degree to which they accept subjugation, and then granting or withholding rights or privileges based solely on their loyalty to the regime.

In essence, the rule regulates the federal government’s collection, retention, and use of American citizens’ personally identifiable information from the date of their first interaction forward.

For background, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the 9/11 Commission, formed by Congress, examined the attacks and our failure to prevent them.  In July 2004, the Commission delivered its report, concluding, in part, that automated information systems used by federal agencies to collect, analyze, and disseminate information in real-time were “woefully inadequate” to address ongoing threats and that the federal government “should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification, such as drivers licenses.”

IRG:

Wisconsin’s 2024 test scores, out tomorrow, are inflated, biased, and unreliable.

How they got that way is the subject of “Testing Our Patience: How Wisconsin Lowered Standards, Widened the Achievement Gap, and Busted Its State Exams,” the latest Institute for Reforming Government Center for Investigative Oversight (IRG CIO) report. The report and supporting materials are located at reforminggovernment.org/test-score-changes. 

What Happened: Public records obtained by IRG CIO reveal DPI management knew its inflation of Wisconsin’s proficiency rates would come at a cost: wider achievement gaps for Black, special needs, and impoverished students, a bias toward schools serving high-income students, and a future where 93% of districts score 4 or 5 stars on state report cards.

Records also revealed that State Superintendent Underly criticized “nonsense going on with literacy” in June 2023, a week after critical Act 20 reading reforms were introduced.

Much more, here.

Joanne Jacobs:

As a math teacher in the early 2000s, Adrian Mims saw few Black and Hispanic students succeeding in Brooklin (MA) High School’s honors and advanced math courses. Disadvantaged students lacked foundational skills, study habits and confidence, writes Javeria Salman for the Hechinger Report.

Mims founded summer classes to prep students for eighth-grade algebra, honors geometry and eventually AP Calculus. His Calculus Project now works with roughly 1,000 students from 14 Boston-area districts, offering summer and after-school classes. Most come from Black, Hispanic and/or low-income families.

David Wakelyn:

A lot of California policymakers journeyed to Finland to see what was in their special sauce when they scored well on PISA a few years ago. Mississippi’s growth has been more durable. We have a lot to learn if we bring an open mind.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Cremieux

There are currently results from two studies, one from the University of Wisconsin (UW) and another from the National Institute on Aging (NIA). The evidence from these studies seemed to be in disagreement when their respective initial publications came out, and overall, the results do not convincingly support survival benefits from caloric restriction. A summary of both results was provided in a 2017 publication that did provide evidence supporting lower age-related morbidity rates for calorically restricted (CR) monkeys:

More.

Rather curiously, Bud Light takes on plagiarism in a recent short.

And.

Sonya Huang and Pat Grady:

Two years into the Generative AI revolution, research is progressing the field from “thinking fast”—rapid-fire pre-trained responses—to “thinking slow”— reasoning at inference time. This evolution is unlocking a new cohort of agentic applications. 

On the second anniversary of our essay “Generative AI: A Creative New World,” the AI ecosystem looks very different, and we have some predictions for what’s on the horizon.

The foundation layer of the Generative AI market is stabilizing in an equilibrium with a key set of scaled players and alliances, including Microsoft/OpenAI, AWS/Anthropic, Meta and Google/DeepMind. Only scaled players with economic engines and access to vast sums of capital remain in play. While the fight is far from over (and keeps escalating in a game-theoretic fashion), the market structure itself is solidifying, and it’s clear that we will have increasingly cheap and plentiful next-token predictions.

Nicholas Eberstadt:

With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven by an unrelenting collapse in fertility, family structures and living arrangements heretofore imagined only in science fiction novels will become commonplace, unremarkable features of everyday life.

Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation. Overall global numbers last declined about 700 years ago, in the wake of the bubonic plague that tore through much of Eurasia. In the following seven centuries, the world’s population surged almost 20-fold. And just over the past century, the human population has quadrupled.

Choose life.

Tressa Pankovits

Charter schools are public schools, free and open to all. Like traditional public schools, charter schools are prohibited from charging tuition, must not discriminate in admissions or be religious in their operation or affiliation, and are overseen by a public entity.

Much has transpired since the first charter school law was approved in 1991 by the state of Minnesota. Today, 46 charter laws have created about 8,000 schools and campuses. Cumulatively, they enroll 3.7 million students (around 7.5% of all public school students), according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ (NAPCS) Data Dashboard. NAPCS also reports that charter schools employ around 251,000 teachers. Around six out of 10 (58.1%) schools are in urban areas, with the others in suburbs (24.9%), rural areas (11.4%), or smaller towns (5.6%).

While there are many nuances, the primary difference between public charter schools and traditional district schools is their governance model. In addition to oversight from a charter school authorizer accredited by state statute, public charter schools are governed by their own nonprofit boards. Board members are normally selected for their strong community connections and their commitment to advancing the particular mission of their school or network of schools.

Bill Ackman:

This could be the worst violation of journalistic ethics ever during a presidential election. @60Minutes literally manipulated @KamalaHarris answer (after the public blowback of her answer from the preview release of the excerpt) by cutting, culling, and pasting her words.

Paul Vallas:

Something’s broken. One year anniversary since the Safe-T Act started and defendants released after their arrest have missed 67,416 court dates. This includes defendants charged with violent felonies in a justice system that is clearly not protecting victims of crime.

Eugene Volokh:

From yesterday’s decision in Moms for Liberty-Brevard County v. Brevard Public Schools, written by Judge Britt Grant and joined by Judge Barbara Lagoa:

For many parents, school board meetings are the front lines of the most meaningful part of local government—the education of their children. And sometimes speaking at these meetings is the primary way parents interact with their local leaders or communicate with other community members. No one could reasonably argue that this right is unlimited, but neither is the government’s authority to restrict it.

Joanne Jacobs:

The most satisfied — 70 percent — have a child in a parochial or other religious school, and non-religious private schools and homeschools are close behind at 65 percent. About half of those with kids in public magnets, charters, online schools and microschools are satisfied.

Support for school choice — especially parent-controlled Education Savings Accounts — is high, reports Colyn Ritter, citing EdChoice’s Schooling in America Survey. “About two-thirds of Americans support school vouchers, charter schools, and tax-credit scholarships. Support for ESAs is much higher at 76 percent.” Parents with school-age children are even more enthusiastic.

Support for school choice could help Donald Trump carry the swing states, predicts Corey DeAngelis, a choice advocate, in the New York Post.

Stephen Wolfram:

Time is a central feature of human experience. But what actually is it? In traditional scientific accounts it’s often represented as some kind of coordinate much like space (though a coordinate that for some reason is always systematically increasing for us). But while this may be a useful mathematical description, it’s not telling us anything about what time in a sense “intrinsically is”. 

We get closer as soon as we start thinking in computational terms. Because then it’s natural for us to think of successive states of the world as being computed one from the last by the progressive application of some computational rule. And this suggests that we can identify the progress of time with the “progressive doing of computation by the universe”. 

But does this just mean that we are replacing a “time coordinate” with a “computational step count”? No. Because of the phenomenon of computational irreducibility. With the traditional mathematical idea of a time coordinate one typically imagines that this coordinate can be “set to any value”, and that then one can immediately calculate the state of the system at that time. But computational irreducibility implies that it’s not that easy. Because it says that there’s often essentially no better way to find what a system will do than by explicitly tracing through each step in its evolution.

Quinton Klabon:

No. This is incorrect.

The Legislature specified certain amounts for certain things. Governor Evers’ partial veto put the money in 1 pot. Whatever.

But DPI then wanted to spend it on wrong stuff, which will waste tens of millions of dollars with no effect.

A deeper dive into taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI’s ongoing rigor reduction campaign

Dan Lennington:

Do No Harm has released its database of hospitals performing sex changes on children. There were 198 sex-change patients in Wisconsin between 2019-2023 who were minors. Here is the top list from Wisconsin:

Jerry Dunleavy:

“The Race & Culture unit… determined that while Dokoupil’s questions & intentions were acceptable, his tone was not… The Standards & Practices division… determined that Dokoupil had not followed the preproduction process where questions are run through Race & Culture.”

The Woke Mind Virus in the New York Times & Washington Post pic.twitter.com/ssYhpWB7Qq

— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) October 10, 2024

WILL

This week, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) unveiled yet another change to how “proficiency” is measured on the state’s Forward exams. This change, not the first in recent years, makes it difficult to tell whether school districts are doing good work and hold them accountable: long-term trend lines can’t be constructed when the targets keep changing.

Worse, these specific changes seem designed to goose performance numbers—not because of sudden, dramatic improvement all across the state, but just by classifying things differently. DPI discarded the old categories of “Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced” and are now using “Developing, Approaching , Meeting, Advanced.” Apart from being less obvious to the user what these terms mean, introducing new terms gives them the excuse to redefine the boundaries for what falls into which category.

The results are shameless. For each school district, we tally what percent of students are “Proficient,” i.e. were graded in either the “Meeting” or the “Advanced” bucket for this year, and compared those percentages to the same statistic (the percentage of students districtwide graded in either “Proficient” or “Advanced”) from last year.

Districts on average boosted their Math proficiency statistic by 14.0 percentage points. The average district’s Math proficiency moved from 44% to 57%, with the crucial result that a majority are now proficient rather than failing proficiency. Meanwhile, the English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency numbers moved by almost as much, 13.2 points on average. Once again, the average district saw this proficiency rate cross the majority threshold, from 42% to 54%.

This really crystalizes the impact of WI’s new, lower standards: Someone could graduate high school “meeting” the new standards but not actually be ready for college.

And they wouldn’t know until it was too late to do anything about it.

Gaming the System: Wisconsin’s Forward Exam Scores Now Useless.

“These (Wisconsin DPI) revisions are a way to make post-pandemic school performance look better just by lowering standards, without improving student outcomes”

More.

——-

Ripple effects:

Lots of people are saying this is frivolous because firefighters should have to pass some test, but let’s go ahead and look at some test questions so you can see why this test is just way too hard.

This first one’s a doozy:

r/teachers:

What’s mind-boggling is that students DON’T EVEN TRY. At this, I also don’t care– I don’t get paid that great– but it still saddens me. Students used to be determined and the standard of learning used to be much higher. I’m sorry if you were punished for keeping your standards high. None of this is fair and the students are suffering tremendously for it.

And

HS teacher chiming it. It’s trickle up for us as well. If I were to impose any actual rigor or memorization requirements I would be out of a job due to the massive failure rate I would have.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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?

Matthew Wielicki:

The first step in fixing our public schools… is getting rid of the administrative class.

“so the point is it was an existence proof, that there’s this entire universe of alternative cost structures that is out there”

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

WILL

Today, Wisconsin’s DPI released the 2023-24 Forward Exam scores for schools across Wisconsin.  In the past, WILL has referred to these scores–and the report card built from them–as creating a “Lake Wobegone” effect where everyone is above average.  But the changes made to the report card this year make the previous version of report cards seem like the pinnacle of accountability.  In this blog post, we will compare the new report card to the old and highlight how DPI’s unilateral power to make changes to the state’s school accountability system must be checked.

What has Changed?

We wrote about some of this in a previously when the changes DPI was planning first became public. In a closed-door meeting that required the signing of a non-disclosure agreement to get into, DPI altered both the labels for categories of Forward Exam achievement and the cut points for those categories.  The new labels are perhaps meant to be less “triggering” for kids, but they are also far less informative for parents. “Below Basic” is now “Developing.” “Basic” is now “Approaching.” “Proficient” is now “Meeting.” And “Advanced,” mercifully, will remain the same.  But far more insidious than changing the names of the categories were changes to what “proficiency” itself means. DPI took it upon itself to alter proficiency standards that have been in place in Wisconsin since 2012.  The new bar was expected to be lower, and that clearly has proven to be the case based on results released today.

“These (Wisconsin DPI) revisions are a way to make post-pandemic school performance look better just by lowering standards, without improving student outcomes”

More.

Sarah Scire:

Pop culture, viral dances, and comedy are big on TikTok. News and politics? Not so much.

A new report from the Pew Research Center finds that Americans on TikTok follow very few politicians, journalists, or traditional media outlets. In fact, the typical U.S. adult on TikTok follows zero accounts in those categories.

For the new analysis published Tuesday, the Pew Research Center used human coding and machine classification to look at a nationally representative group of 664 U.S. adults who use TikTok and the 227,946 unique accounts they follow. (Pew researchers have shared details on how they use OpenAI’s GPT model to tackle “rote” research tasks before.) Journalists, traditional media outlets, and politicians each accounted for less than half of 1% of the followed accounts.

Jay P. Greene, PhD

It should come as no surprise that educators tend to be more liberal than the general public. But it is less well-known just how liberal they are, how much professors differ from K-12 teachers, and how much the ideological inclinations of educators vary across states.

In this analysis, we examine 437,783 campaign contributions made by K-12 teachers and university professors during the 2022 election cycle to gain a better understanding of the political orientation of the people who teach our children. The results show that university professors lean much more to the left than do K-12 teachers, and this monolithic support for Democratic political candidates among professors hardly varies with the partisan composition of the state in which they are located. While decidedly liberal, K-12 teachers are less so than professors, and the extent of their leftward tilt tends to vary with the partisan make-up of each state.

Aaron Sibarium:

The dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, Jerlando Jackson, plagiarized extensively over the course of his career, according to a complaint filed with the university on Thursday, lifting text without attribution and raising questions about his fitness to lead one of the top teacher training programs in the country.

The complaint includes nearly 40 examples of plagiarism that span nine of Jackson’s papers, including his Ph.D. thesis, and range from single sentences to full pages. It adds to the allegations of research misconduct already facing the embattled dean, who was a coauthor on several papers implicated in complaints against diversity officials earlier this year, including Harvard University’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston.

“Jackson has failed all ordinary standards of academic honesty,” said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former provost at Boston University, where he helped lead plagiarism investigations of faculty and alumni. “As long as he remains as a dean, the university has no legitimate basis to hold students and faculty to basic standards of intellectual integrity.”

Holly Korby:

Recent research suggests that the number of students seeking help with academics is growing, and that over the last couple of decades, more families have been turning to tutoring for that help. Private tutoring for K–12 students has seen explosive growth both nationally and around the globe. Between 1997 and 2022, the number of in-person, private tutoring centers across the United States more than tripled, concentrated mostly in high-income areas like Brentwood. Many students are also logging onto laptops to get personalized digital tutoring, with companies like WyzAnt and Outschool reporting they’ve enrolled millions of students for millions of hours in private, video-based learning sessions that students access conveniently from home. Market reports estimate the digital tutoring market was worth $7.7 billion globally in 2022, with projections of a compound annual growth rate of nearly 15 percent from 2023 to 2030.

Increasingly, public schools are also offering tutoringto help students catch up on learning they might have lost during the rocky years of school closures and mass quarantines. This tutoring, often embedded into the school day, is mostly provided by nonprofit companies and paid for with Covid relief funds.

While some of tutoring’s rise can be explained by the pandemic and associated learning loss, experts say families are increasingly willing to go outside of school to add academic time to students’ days—and pay a hefty price for it—for a variety of reasons. These include the ease of education technology, declining trust in schools and instructional quality, and shifting attitudes around personalization—the “For You”-ification of our modern digital lives that’s bringing big changes to how families view education.

Douglas MacMillan, David Ovalle and Aaron Schaffer

Hundreds of Americans have been arrested after being connected to a crime by facial recognition software, a Washington Post investigation has found, but many never know it because police seldom disclose their use of the controversial technology.

Police departments in 15 states provided The Post with rarely seen records documenting their use of facial recognition in more than 1,000 criminal investigations over the past four years. According to the arrest reports in those cases and interviews with people who were arrested, authorities routinely failed to inform defendants about their use of the software — denying them the opportunity to contest the results of an emerging technology that is prone to error, especially when identifying people of color.

John A. List  & Haruka Uchida

An unsettling stylized fact is that decorated early childhood education programs improve cognitive skills in the short-term, but lose their efficacy after a few years. We implement a field experiment with two stages of randomization to explore the underpinnings of the fade-out effect. We first randomly assign preschool access to children, and then partner with the local school district to randomly assign the same children to classmates throughout elementary school. We find that the fade-out effect is critically-linked to the share of classroom peers assigned to preschool access—with enough treated peers the classic fade-out effect is muted. Our results highlight a paradoxical insight: while the fade-out effect has been viewed as a devastating critique of early childhood programs, our results highlight that fade-out is a key rationale for providing early education to all children. This is because human capital accumulation is inherently a social activity, leading early education programs to deliver their largest benefits at scale when everyone receives such programs.

Erica Portnoy:

Teens between the ages of  13 and 17 are being tracked across the internet using identifiers known as Advertising IDs. When children turn 13, they age out of the data protections provided by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Then, they become targets for data collection from data brokers that collect their information from social media apps, shopping history, location tracking services, and more. Data brokers then process and sell the data. Deleting Advertising IDs off your teen’s devices can increase their privacy and stop advertisers collecting their data.

What is an Advertising ID?

Advertising identifiers – Android’s Advertising ID (AAID) and Identifier for Advertising (IDFA) on iOS – enable third-party advertising by providing device and activity tracking information to advertisers. The advertising ID is a string of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies your phone, tablet, or other smart device.

Andy Kessler:

Sixty years ago this month, the Free Speech Movement was born at the University of California, Berkeley. How is that working out?

In mid-September 1964, Berkeley’s dean of students banned tables and political activity along the Bancroft strip, a 26-foot stretch of university-owned sidewalk near Telegraph Avenue down from Sproul Plaza. I walked around the area last week and found, almost paradoxically, a capitalist BMO Bank, a Marxist-glorifying César Chávez Student Center and a techno-optimist Open Computing Facility.

Berkeley’s 1964 students protested the table ban. On Sept. 30, five students were cited. More than 400 insisted that they were also responsible and should all be cited too. They then staged their first sit-in inside Sproul Hall, Berkeley’s administration building. The next day, tables were set up outside Sproul Hall. The police were called and arrested Jack Weinberg. Some 200 students surrounded the police car. Speeches began as thousands assembled. Mario Savio emerged as a Free Speech Movement leader.

With the cop car still surrounded by late afternoon on Oct. 2, 500 police officers were on hand at the university. A six-point agreement was reached with the university president, and the protests ended. As is typical of universities, committees were formed. A six-week ban on tables was instituted and Mario Savio and others were suspended. But by mid-November, the tables were back, and 3,000 students marched around campus.

Scott Bauer:

Justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court said Wednesday that Gov. Tony Evers’ creative use of his expansive veto power in an attempt to lock in a school funding increase for 400 years appeared to be “extreme” and “crazy” but questioned whether and how it should be reined in.

“It does feel like the sky is the limit, the stratosphere is the limit,” Justice Jill Karofsky said during oral arguments, referring to the governor’s veto powers. “Perhaps today we are at the fork in the road … I think we’re trying to think should we, today in 2024, start to look at this differently.”

The case, supported by the Republican-controlled Legislature, is the latest flashpoint in a decades-long fight over just how broad Wisconsin’s governor’s partial veto powersshould be. The issue has crossed party lines, with Republicans and Democrats pushing for more limitations on the governor’s veto over the years.

Sarah Parshall Perry

Judge Conti wrote:

“In elementary school, it is constitutionally impermissible for a school to provide teachers with the unbridled discretion to determine to teach about a noncurricular topic—transgender identity—and not to provide notice and opt out rights based on parents’ moral and religious beliefs about transgender instruction, while providing notice and opt out rights for other sensitive secular and religious topics.”

Judge Conti found that the school had violated:

• The parents’ 14th Amendment parental rights & familial privacy rights;
• The parents’ 14th Amendment Equal Protection rights;
• The parents’ 14th Amendment Due Process rights; and
• The parents’ 1st Amendment free exercise rights.

Jennifer Berkshire:

Massachusetts voters loathe the obsessive focus on standardized testing in our schools – and that is a bitter pill for our policy elites to swallow. Fear mongering from media & edreform inc over this ballot ? appears to have been utterly ineffective

Meanwhile, reducing rigor continues at the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI.

Austin Berg:

Four members of the Chicago Teachers Union have filed a lawsuit against the CTU, demanding that the union produce an audit after failing to do so for four years.

Under CTU’s Constitution and Bylaws, Article VI, Section 1(d), the union is required to “furnish an audited report of the Union which shall be printed in the Union’s publication.”

Elizabeth Schumacher:

The Council for German Orthography (RdR) caused a stir amongst grammar perfectionists on Monday when it announced that as of 2025, an apostrophe used to indicate possession will be considered correct.

Since 2004, the RdR has been considered the leading source on Standard High German spelling and grammar, and is relied on for school textbooks in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

In English, possession of an object is almost always implied by use of an apostrophe, as in: Henry’s Bar, Bloomingdale’s department store.

More.

Nicholas Garton and Danielle DuClos

If the referendum next month passes, one proposal estimates a homeowner with a property value of $457,000 would pay about $3,330 in taxes to the city — a $313 increase from the current year.

If the referendum fails, the other budget proposal estimates the same homeowner would pay around $3,100 — still an $83 increase. Although the city’s overall tax rate would decline, a nearly 8% increase in average home values could lead to higher payments for homeowners.

Without funding from the referendum, Rhodes-Conway also proposes the city add an “infrastructure special charge” of $76 per year to a typical single-family home. The fee would generate about $10 million annually citywide which, paired with cuts and dipping into budget reserves, would help fill the city’s financial deficit next year.

Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.

Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

Sarah Krouse, Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha and Robert McMillan:

A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.

For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.

Ed West

As the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges explained, on why he preferred this language more than any other: ‘English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers — for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word.’

He was correct, and without this French and Latin influence our language would be far poorer. For that we should be thankful, grateful and appreciative.

John Sailer:

Fisher Derderian writes about how this has happened with the National Endowment of the Arts, which is giving out out $12M to NGOs that show their commitment to “equity.”

Dan Lennington:

The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Skylar Croy, stated, “All law students deserve an equal shot to compete for prestigious post-law school employment. No one should assess them based on the color of their skin—especially not the ABA and especially not judges. Instead, they should be considered based on their individual talents and knowledge of the law. We will continue to challenge race-based programs to reach WILL’s goal of complete race neutrality.” 

Additional Background: Most judges hire a recent graduate as a “law clerk.” These jobs are often considered a golden ticket to a successful legal career. For example, six of nine current U.S. Supreme Court justices once clerked for the Court.  

Christopher F. Rufo, Christina Buttons:

The best way to understand the migrant crisis is to follow the flow of people, money, and power—in other words, to trace the supply chain of human migration. In Charleroi, we have mapped the web of institutions that have facilitated the flow of migrants from Port-au-Prince. Some of these institutions are public and, as such, must make their records available; others, to avoid scrutiny, keep a low profile.

The initial, and most powerful, institution is the federal government. Over the past four years, Customs and Border Patrol has reported hundreds of thousands of encounters with Haitian nationals. In addition, the White House has admitted more than 210,000 Haitians through its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which it paused in early August and has since relaunched. The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, have called it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country.

The next link in the web is the network of publicly funded NGOs that provide migrants with resources to assist in travel, housing, income, and work. These groups are called “national resettlement agencies,” and serve as the key middleman in the flow of migration. The scale of this effort is astounding. These agencies are affiliated with more than 340 local offices nationwide and have received some $5.5 billion in new awards since 2021. And, because they are technically non-governmental institutions, they are not required to disclose detailed information about their operations.

Zachary R Mider and Nic Querolo:

At 1 p.m. on certain Saturday afternoons, hundreds of foreign-born professionals from all over the US converge on a small city in central Pennsylvania. They assemble in a high-rise office building, where they sit through four hours of college classes. Then they return to the airport and head home. 

What’s drawing these students to Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is not the prospect of landing a good job. A majority already have one. Nor is it the prestige of a Harrisburg degree. If they’re lucky, they won’t ever graduate.

Susan B. Porter, Timothy N. Odegard, Emily A. Farris & Eric L. Oslund:

The importance of having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom is an educational necessity. Determining which teacher characteristics define teacher quality and measuring their impact on student outcomes has offered mixed results. This study explored the effect of teachers’ knowledge of language and literacy on their students’ reading outcomes in foundational skills and reading comprehension. Data from 9,640 students and 512 classroom teachers in 112 schools were analyzed using multi-level mixed effects modeling to account for the nested data. After controlling for student and teacher-level variables, results showed that teachers’ knowledge of language and literacy reliably predicted students’ spring foundational skills scores, but not reading comprehension scores. These findings support the idea that more knowledgeable teachers generate students with more favorable reading outcomes. Implications are discussed in addition to directions for future research.