Greg Lukianoff

I am excited to announce that an adapted chapter (with a ton of new data) from Rikki Schlott and my book ‘The Canceling of the American Mind’ will be the cover story at Reason magazine next month. It describes what we call the Conformity Gauntlet — the incredibly difficult road you have in academia if you step out of line or question the ideological orthodoxy. 

As in the phrase “running the gauntlet,” the process involves a series of hurdles, challenges, and setbacks you must overcome to reach your goal. In the Conformity Gauntlet, however, these trials have nothing to do with your level of skill, intelligence, or competence, but rather your rigidness in adhering to the ideas and behaviors of the academic ruling class. The idea is to keep dissenters out or at least make them extremely hesitant to dissent, and it works very well.

In the first part of the piece, Rikki and I explain the research which shows that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements function as political litmus tests. I mean, of course they do, but Nate Honeycutt at FIRE has done some really interesting experiments proving what should be obvious.

We then take the reader on an imaginary tour of academia from the point of view of an independent-minded highschooler and demonstrate how many conformity pressures he or she will face on their way to becoming a scientist. Layering the threats to free speech and conformity pressures on top of each other is key to really understanding how the Conformity Gauntlet works, because no single case really conveys how bad it’s gotten for freedom of inquiry and freedom of thought on campus on a systematic basis.

Chad Aldeman

In April, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the 50 states and Washington, D.C., took in $1 trillion in federal, state and local revenue for K-12 public education in the 2023-24 school year.

One. Trillion. Dollars. 

That’s a remarkable milestone. And while it doesn’t tell the whole story — it represents only revenues, not expenditures — it speaks to five trends that help explain where K-12 finance stands today.

More money, fewer students 

On an inflation-adjusted basis, schools had 22% more money to spend in 2023-24 than a decade earlier. One-time federal relief funds played a role here, and as a result, federal revenues had the largest jump in percentage terms (up 65%). But schools rely much more heavily on state and local funding, and those revenues also rose by 18% each. Meanwhile, schools served about 500,000 fewer students, a decline of 1.1%. 

Put differently, schools are serving fewer students with substantially more money than they did a decade ago.

The national averages mask wide variation across the states 

On average, public schools spent $17,619 per student in the 2023-24 school year. But there was enormous variation, with places like New York and the District of Columbia spending more than $30,000 per student, while states like Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi spent closer to $11,000 or $12,000 per child. 

——

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Oregon Journalism Project

The county seat of Malheur is Vale, population 2,000. Located 12 miles west of the Idaho border, the Vale School District has 865 students and, according to OJP’s analysis, enjoys an attendance rate other districts dream of—83%. That’s 18.5 points above the state average.

The start of its attendance recovery began in the 2021–22 school year, when McBride, the Vale superintendent, received an email from a local court official that floored her:

School districts across the state could no longer issue citations to parents for truancy violations.

This change occurred because, a few months earlier, lawmakers from both parties passed Senate Bill 817. Coming in the wake of George Floyd Jr.’s murder in Minneapolis, the bill wiped out juvenile justice fines, costs for court-assigned lawyers, probation fees, and other “aggressive and racially discriminatory fees,” according to the advocacy group Our Children Oregon.

But the bill also eliminated using the court system to enforce attendance laws, specifically the use of citations and fines. In doing so, according to a recent survey by Attendance Works, Oregon became one of only two states with this specific prohibition.

McBride and other superintendents thought the change was crazy. “[Now] there wasn’t a lever to say, no, you must send your child to school,” McBride said

——

Commentary.

Harmeet Dhillon

Elizabeth Bernstein:

Shoshana Rubli was shocked by her therapist’s advice, given in her second session. But the counselor was recommended by someone she knew and had impressive credentials,

so she did as she was told.

She cut off all ties with her mother.

“It was an argument made from authority, so I followed it,” says the 42-year-old freelance marketer.

Is it really good therapy to break your mother’s heart?

After decades of urging families to communicate better and work on their issues together, some therapists are now taking an opposite tack: They’re encouraging estrangement as a means of self-care.

Proponents of the trend hold that advising patients to consider a cutoff from a close relative or spouse they deem toxic or unsupportive can protect their mental health and allow for emotional growth. Meanwhile, critics-many of whom are researchers who have studied relationships for decades-say that it encourages self-centeredness and self-delusion and ruins families.

——

More.

Jessica Calefati:

An Anne Arundel County Public Schools policy that protects students’ right to be called by their chosen name at school is the target of a federal lawsuit filed by parents who say it conflicts with the family’s religious beliefs. 

Plaintiffs John and Jane Doe, represented by an attorney at America First Legal Foundation, allege teachers and staff at an area high school lied about and hid their child’s gender transition last school year because of district policy. 

The lawsuit, filed last week, is America First Legal’s latest effort to bring conservative influence into public schools. The nonprofit was founded by Stephen Miller, an influential advisor to President Donald Trump, and has taken aim at other policies designed to support students regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

Here’s what to know about the school system’s policy and what’s at stake. 

US Senate Committee:

Featured Files

CBP Wanted to Question and Search Peter Daszak. The FBI Said No.

July 20, 2026 – Newly released documents show CBP built a formal targeting action to question President of  EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak on his return from the WHO’s COVID-19 origins mission — before the FBI stepped in and asked agents to stand down.

The Record So Far

Fauci’s Two-Decade Relationship with the Intelligence Community

June 6, 2026 – Newly released documents trace Dr. Anthony Fauci’s connections to the national security and intelligence apparatus back to 2003, showing his involvement in reviewing CIA and National Intelligence Council reports on bioweapons threats years before COVID-19. The release includes the email exchange in which Fauci directed Kristian Andersen to report furin cleavage site concerns to the FBI and MI5, records of classified national security briefings provided to Fauci in 2021, and a Marine Corps DARPA fellow’s inspector general memo alleging that a 2018 EcoHealth Alliance DARPA proposal — never publicly disclosed — describes the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

New Documents Show Years of Warnings and Workarounds Before NIH Scientists Were Charged With Attempting to Smuggle Monkeypox into U.S.

———

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

——-

New Slack Messages: Proximal Origin Authors Privately Doubted Their Own “No Lab Leak” Conclusion

x summary

Drawing from a 2026 OECD survey, the claim notes U.S. tertiary-educated adults lag globally, with 14% at the lowest literacy levels compared to 8% worldwide, amid K-12 roots where only 33% of 12th-graders read proficiently. Federal subsidies and $1.7 trillion in student loans fuel tuition hikes, with average public four-year costs nearing $26,000 yearly and critics decrying poor outcomes like graduates focused on ideology over skills. As enrollment dips and alternatives like trades gain appeal, voices call for reforms such as ending unlimited loans to restore accountability.

This story is a summary of posts on X and may evolve over time.

Grok can make mistakes, verify its outputs.

The Snow Report:

There’s no shortage of odd, confusing, infuriating, ill-founded and contentious claims in education, and in the wider social chattersphere that sits around it, but surely there’s one that we can put to bed for good and for all: the idea that it is the job of parents to teach their children how to read – and by extension, that parents are to blame when children struggle in this endeavour.

There are many reasons why this cosy, middle-class-meme-cum-system-level-excuse-for-schools needs to be exploded and I’ll address as many as I can here. 

First of all though, I think we can agree that reading is a fundamentally important life-skill and one that is best fostered in the early years of school. Reading is the means by which students engage with the academic curriculum and have the opportunity to succeed at school. The downstream benefits of successful early reading achievement yield the kinds of investment returns we can only dream of for our financial portfolios. When students become proficient readers in a timely and smooth way, they are more likely to succeed academically. When students achieve academically, they are more likely to display prosocial, on-task behaviour in classrooms. When students display prosocial, on-task classroom behaviours, they are more likely to feel a sense of attachment to school, to stay at school, and to exit secondary school with open doors to postsecondary training, education and/or employment. When schools have early reading instruction nailed, they are also going a long way to addressing student wellbeing. It’s hard to be self-regulated, calm, and ready-to-learn if you are locked out of the writing system by which learning is transacted in classrooms (see references at the end of this post).

——-

More.

Peter Lindblad:

Enrollment in the Monona Grove School District is projected to decline, according to Sarah Kemp, of the University of Wisconsin Applied Population Lab.

“In five years, you’re looking at anywhere between a little over 3,000 [to] as little as 2,986,” said Kemp, who manages the organization’s School Enrollment Projections Program.

Kemp presented the Lab’s study to the school board on Tuesday, July 14. She reported that the biggest drop-offs are expected at the elementary school level.

In a somewhat related move, the board voted unanimously to add nine new 4-year-old kindergarten spots to its open enrollment offerings for 2026-27.

Overall, Kemp noted that enrollment in the district over the last 10 years rose from 3,069 in 2026-27 to 3,158 in 2025-26 for a 3% increase. This applies only to resident, in-building students, she said.

During that stretch, looking at 4-year-old kindergarten, the numbers were steady, according to Kemp. A 3% decline has occurred in grades 5K to fifth. There was also a slight decrease of 1% at the middle school level, while the high school has seen the most growth with an increase of nearly 19%.

Gregory Kearney, Joshua D. Rauh:

The results for Illinois were especially stark. In 2023, pension contributions absorbed on average of more than 21% of the portion of expenditures related to employees covered by the pension systems (this is spending on instruction, administration, operations and other categories directly linked to covered employees).That is the second-highest burden in the country. Since 2015, this share has risen by more than five percentage points. Adjusting for inflation, Illinois schools’ pension contributions increased by $1.9 billion over this period, while total associated education expenditures including those contributions grew by only $1.3 billion. 

This has put growing pressure on other important education expenditures. If pension spending’s claim on the budget were still at 2015 levels — 15.3% — Illinois school districts would have had an additional $1.72 billion in 2023 to use for educational costs with a direct bearing on student learning — think salaries for new teachers, new classroom resources or additional support services such as counselors or teacher aides.

Worse, these numbers probably understate the actual problem significantly. This is because the funding ratios largely depend on optimistic investment assumptions embedded in pension accounting, with the state mostly assuming long-run returns of roughly 7%. And if actual returns fall short of the rosy assumptions, the state’s required contributions made on behalf of school districts will jump.

In our analysis, we addressed this uncertainty by re-estimating Illinois’ unfunded liabilities using market-based Treasury yields — a relatively conservative benchmark. The resulting change in the projection was substantial. Under this approach, annual pension contributions would need to increase from roughly $7 billion today to more than $15.7 billion. That would push the budgetary burden of pension contributions to nearly 37% of all covered employee spending.

Jonathan Turley:

According to the latest Gallup poll, only 38% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. One of the Gallup experts told Fox News that one of the key reasons for the continued slide in public trust is “the perception that there’s a political agenda being taught.” That perception is well documented after most departments purged their ranks of any republican, conservative, or libertarian faculty members. At the same time, many faculty oppose the long-standing principle of institutional neutrality for universities, the subject of a recent debatethat I had with the President of the American Association of University Professors. 

Gallup’s expert added that there is also a view that we are “not teaching people the right kinds of things they need to succeed in the job once they finish.”

As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.

According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.

Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.

kirschner-ED:

Two notes before you begin reading this post. The first is that this piece is longer than it should be. It’s a synopsis of three posts by others totalling more than 5000 words with my own thoughts added. If it’s too long, then here’s a synopsis of my synopsis:

This post synthesises recent critiques of Alpha School by Robert Pondiscio, Jared Cooney Horvath, and Dylan Kane, examining its claim that students can complete academic learning in two hours a day through adaptive software and AI tutoring. While the model may offer genuine efficiencies and valuable enrichment, its assertion that students learn 2.6 times faster remains difficult to evaluate because the underlying data, methods, student selection, and wider school conditions have not been independently scrutinised. Moreover, they argue that rapid progress on software-aligned assessments does not necessarily demonstrate durable learning, long-term retention, or transfer to unfamiliar contexts. The post also questions whether screen-based, adaptive systems encourage deep understanding or merely teach students to optimise for task completion, potentially replacing human judgement by the teacher with increased monitoring by the system. More fundamentally, it asks whether Alpha is reducing academic subjects to content that should be mastered as quickly as possible, overlooking the role of teachers, other students, discussion, shared intellectual culture, and sustained engagement in developing knowledge and independence. Alpha should therefore be regarded as a possibly promising educational experiment, not yet as evidence that AI can replace teachers or make conventional schooling obsolete.

The second is that I was aided in this exercise by ChatGPT (for example in writing the above synopsis). Not the least in helping to turn my acquired Dunglish into something resembling English.

I’ve been bombarded in the last few days by blogs, articles, Substacks, etc. about Alpha School. Apparently – understatement – there’s a kerfuffle about the school with supporters, detractors, and people on the fence. This a synopsis of three recent pieces that I found in my feed. One is from Robert Pondiscio, one is from Jared Cooney Horvath, and one is from Dylan Kane. All three pose more questions than answers, and that’s why I’m combining them here for you. I definitely advise everyone to read the original pieces as well as follow these three.

Alpha School makes an extraordinary promise: children can complete their academic learning in just two hours a day, using adaptive software and AI tutors, and spend the rest of their time developing practical skills, pursuing projects, and following their interests.

Wall Street Journal:

A federal judge recently blocked the Trump Administration’s effort to rein in a giveaway for higher-education graduates who work in government or social advocacy. The message to Republicans in Congress is to get with it and limit this student-loan subsidy favoritism.

The 19-year-old Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is the monster progeny of George W. Bush and Nancy Pelosi. Its initial goal was to encourage young people to pursue jobs in government and at nonprofits, though these lines of work no longer need subsidizing, if they ever did.

Graduates can have their debt discharged after working 10 years for government or a 501(c)3 nonprofit and making modest payments during that time. As of January, the government had discharged $90.6 billion for some 1.2 million borrowers, averaging $75,000 per person. The aggregate limit for undergraduate loans is $31,000 for students who are dependents, so this means most beneficiaries have advanced degrees.

The left-leaning Student Borrower Protection Center estimates that more than nine million workers—roughly a quarter of federal student loan borrowers—are eligible for the program. An Education Department report last year found that the biggest beneficiaries are employees in K-12 schools (28%), higher education (15%), and healthcare nonprofits (12%).

The Economist:

visitor to the playground at Valbyparken, a green expanse in Copenhagen, is in for three surprises. The first is that the sprawling public children’s park is built on what was once a rubbish tip for the Danish capital. The second is the free coffee on offer for harried parents. But perhaps the most unexpected is the eagerness of the playground’s staff to hand out knives to children. Or axes, if they prefer. Or even, for tots bored with mere weaponry, some fire-starting equipment. Off you go, kids, and do be careful (oh and parents please keep an eye on them). Sprogs of an age that in most countries would barely be allowed onto a swing unattended scamper away to whittle sticks and soon imagine themselves carving their own magic wand, or the oar of a Viking longship.
The knife-dispensing strategy may appear to some as an oversight that keeps the local hospital bustling with injured kids in summer. On the contrary. Injecting a dose of risk into children’s free-ranging fun is a feature, not a bug. The nature-based playground offers a litany of ways for children to get bruised, bumped, scratched and dirty. There are trees to climb, brambly branches to rearrange, tricycles to ride (often into each other), a play pond to stumble into, then trails to get lost in far from nosy parents. Adult chaperones may fret about lurking hazards, but their peace of mind is secondary. “It’s children who need to be aware of every step they take,” says Helle Nebelong, a former Copenhagen city official who designed the place at the turn of the century. “They must take responsibility for their own safety.” A cadre of young staff are there to catalyse play rather than stymie it.

Richard Dooling:

George Orwell closed his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” with six rules for writers, the first of which commands: “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” It is the rule against clichés—don’t beat dead horses, cry over spilled milk or freeze like a deer in the headlights.

“The fight against bad English,” Orwell wrote, “is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” Authors and academics are often the worst abusers of ready-made phrases and buzzwords. They put their readers to sleep by deploying trite phrases in the passive voice. Good, honest writing isn’t only hard work; it can get you canceled for being direct about a controversial topic.

Enter artificial intelligence, which can flag clichés by analyzing the frequency at which figures of speech occur in data sets. But replacing clichés with something vivid and original is a harder task. In Orwell’s parlance, large-language models show us what they are used to seeing in print. These models are like giant looms. They select complementary textual threads from vast data warehouses and weave them together to create tapestries of prose.

Amanda Geduld:

There’s a prevailing principle in the U.S. that funding disparities are at the root of education inequality, with poorer districts receiving less money than their wealthier counterparts. But a recent study has actually found the opposite, documenting that over the past nearly 50 years high-poverty and predominantly non-white districts across all 50 states actually spent more per student on average.

That being said, a number of these districts face higher labor costs, which offsets at least some of that advantage, according to the research from Brookings.

The findings “raise questions about what I see as a predominant narrative that local property tax finance means that poor schools don’t have as much money and that that is a core, structural cause of inequality, and I just think it’s not,” said Sarah Reber, a senior fellow in economic studies at Brookings and the report’s lead author. 

“That doesn’t mean giving poor schools more money wouldn’t help. It could help,” she added, but “if we’re spending all of our time … focused on the level and allocation of school funding, we’re missing other important things.”

To do this work, Reber and her colleagues used data collected by the Census Bureau, which surveys school districts on their spending and enrollment. They then divided districts into five groups, or quintiles, based on poverty rates and racial composition, with the first quintile being the least poor and the fifth being the most and the first quintile having the lowest share of non-white students and the fifth having the most.(Credit: Brookings)

They found that spending allocations across these five poverty brackets is U-shaped, with the poorest and wealthiest districts spending the most. Since the early 2000s, the poorest districts have outspent even the wealthiest ones. Part of this U-shape can be explained because states send more money to high-poverty districts, while affluent public schools are more likely to be in wealthier, higher-spending states.

——-

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Nate Silver:

In today’s newsletter, I argue this is the sweet spot for the DSA. DSA members are very college-educated (80% BA+) but not particularly well-off (45% HHI incomes below $60K). Their class status is ambiguous. But they tend to be very liberal on culture as well as economics.

——-

Downwardly mobile elites are the bread-and-butter of the Dems.

——-

Rather, we identify a key operational channel: the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.

——-

There is a ton of discussion about this today. But note that while THE BEST cohort for Dems is low-income ppl w/ a graduate degree, there is only a 4 percentage point gap to the highest income cohort. What this shows more strongly is that advanced education is associated with leftism.

——-

This is where your DSA problem is coming from, right here. It’s all people who grew up upper middle class, or who inserted themselves into a traditionally upper middle class milieu, and then found out that no one wants to pay them $150k to hear them spout off Critical Theory.

Megan Greenwell:

It’s three weeks until Mississippi’s standardized test season begins, and Candace Hamberlin is feeling the pressure.

Evidence of what’s at stake hangs all around Jefferson County Middle School, where Hamberlin is in her first year teaching eighth-grade English. Inside her classroom, a large piece of black polyester with clear pouches labeled “Data Wall” shows the current reading level of each student. The school hallways are lined with posters listing schoolwide scores on an earlier practice test. One prominently displays the grade Mississippi would assign their school if that practice test had been the real thing: 175 out of 700 points, an F.

Jefferson County is one of the smallest in Mississippi; 6,800 people spread across 527 square miles along the Mississippi River. It’s also one of the poorest, with 32 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Fayette, where the only public elementary, middle, and high school are all based, is the only city in the county, home to about a dozen churches but not a single stoplight. The county is 13 percent white, but most of those families send their kids to private or parochial schools; 98 percent of the school district’s students are Black.

Inside Hamberlin’s classroom, it’s time for test-prep drills. This period has 20 eighth graders enrolled, but only 10 are present; six have been pulled out for remedial work with a consultant the district has hired to boost test scores, and the remaining four are absent for unclear reasons. The students in the room each grab a Chromebook and log in, at speeds ranging from feet-dragging to actively resistant. They open the StudySync software program, which shows them each a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they’re being marched to the guillotine.

Much of literacy instruction at Jefferson County Middle School now begins and ends with screens. In fact, Hamberlin doesn’t lecture at all on Wednesdays and Thursdays; students spend those class periods with StudySync and i-Ready, another adaptive software program, so each can focus where they need the most help.

Their teacher can’t blame them for being sick of these exercises. The students’ lives, and hers, are dominated by the looming Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP), the set of annual standardized exams that measure their progress in language arts as well as science and math. Test prep is a year-round activity. Her students must learn how to decode the meaning of unfamiliar words, make inferences, identify the central idea of a passage, analyze tone and point of view. Every Friday brings a practice test.

———

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

NJ Gov Sherrill

Last week I learned that a serious software error in New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle System led to the registration of roughly 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens between June 2023 and June 2024, almost three years prior to my taking office. These individuals answered “no” when asked on a keypad whether they were a U.S. citizen when applying for drivers’ licenses and identification cards, but through no fault of their own, the system registered them anyway.

This happened under the previous administration and, upon learning this information, I immediately ordered my chief counsel to launch an investigation to get to the bottom of what occurred. I also ordered the removal of any residents from our voter rolls who were erroneously added between June 2023 and June 2024. The new MVC Administrator that I appointed has begun the process of replacing the vendor responsible for administering the system.

Our preliminary analysis shows fewer than 400 individuals who were newly registered for the first time because of the error voted. They were registered as Democrats, Republicans and Unaffiliated voters and were scattered across the state.

——-

Patrick Marley.

Megan McArdle

Carolyn Rouse, the president of the American Anthropological Association, was not one to stay silent while outsiders claimed that her field had abandoned rigorous argument in favor of social justice orthodoxy. No, sir. Instead, she opened her mouth and proved it.

Her interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education has to be read to be believed. No, strike that, I’ve read it three times, and I am still struggling to convince myself that it’s real.

“They used AI,” said the Princeton anthropology professor, apparently unaware that using artificial intelligence to survey large bodies of text is an increasingly common method in many social science fields. She rambled about a couple of passing references to Socrates as if this somehow discredited the report. (Did you know the ancient Greeks had enslaved people?) She asserted that teaching there are two sexes would be “the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department.”

When the interviewer pushes back on that last point, she tries to dodge and weave, but has no idea what an effective dodge would be. So we end up watching an unintentional comedian take repeated pratfalls, such as suggesting that people who believe sex is binary maybe “want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY,” and that teaching that sex is binary is as inappropriate in a classroom as debating the pros and cons of interning Japanese people. Perhaps this sounds more coherent if you are fluent in Anthropologese, but to those outside the tribe? Woof.

It makes for painful reading, not just because Rouse can’t seem to untangle her foot from her tonsils, but because she exemplifies some of the deepest problems with academia today. She also illustrates the reasons those problems haven’t been fixed.

Marian L. Tupy

Three days before his 2025 inauguration, Donald Trumplaunched a cryptocurrency called $TRUMP. That May, he dined with 220 of its largest holders, some of whom bought up the coin expressly to secure invitations. In October Mr. Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, a Binance co-founder who had been convicted of violating money-laundering laws. Binance had assigned a team to develop the stablecoin for World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture tied to the Trump family. The undertaking netted Mr. Trump hundreds of millions, part of $1 billion in crypto gains, while most token buyers lost money. Last year Paramount agreed to pay Mr. Trump $16 million—with some payments made to his future presidential library—to settle a lawsuit it had called meritless, and within weeks the government approved its $8 billion merger with Skydance.

Each episode has been reported, with people raising questions about Mr. Trump’s behavior. But what makes such conduct possible in the first place? Democrats rightly blame the man.

Mike Greenberg

April 3, 2012, began like any other day for Ken Jouppi, a longtime bush pilot in Alaska. He was scheduled to fly a passenger and her groceries from Fairbanks 110 miles north to the village of Beaver. Hidden in the passenger’s luggage, though, were three cases of beer—two Budweiser, one Bud Light—intended as a gift to her husband, who worked in Beaver as the local postmaster. 

The beer was illegal to bring to Beaver, which voted to prohibit alcohol in 2004.  Before Ken could take off, state troopers searched the plane and discovered the beer. Ken insisted he did not know about the beer. He was nevertheless charged, convicted and sentenced to the statutory minimum: a $1,500 fine and three days in jail.

But the State wasn’t done with him yet. For the past thirteen years, prosecutors have also been trying to forfeit his airplane, a Cessna U206D, worth about $95,000. And this past April, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the harm of a single six-pack of beer warranted seizing something as valuable as an airplane. 

Jouppi v. Alaska.

Paul Vallas:

When word spread the Chicago Board of Education was planning cuts to teaching staff to narrow the $732.5 million budget deficit, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates declared their plan was “unsatisfactory and dead on arrival.” She alone demanded Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly address the shortfall claiming CPS schools are being shortchanged $1.6 billion in funding under the Evidence‑Based Funding (EBF) formula.

Since the May board meeting, Davis Gates has been joined by Mayor Brandon Johnson to demand the state step in and finally “fully fund” Chicago’s public schools. To listen to Johnson tell it, the impending budget cuts and layoffs to teachers and support staff are a sad tale of repeated betrayals, letdowns, and, above all, disappointing failures of nerve among lawmakers in Springfield to take the necessary action to meet its financial obligations under the EBF to the Chicago’s schools.

The Evidence‑Based Funding (EBF) formula was supposedly designed to ensure every school district has the resources necessary to provide a high‑quality education and to direct new state resources toward the most underfunded districts to counter historic funding inequities. Unfortunately, it has provided an excuse for continuous increases in school funding without regard to a district’s academic performance, while protecting underperforming districts from enrollment losses.

———

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

United States Department of State:

Cuba’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory. It was a revolution against Western civilization itself — waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the West to turn against their own inheritance.

Ground News:

• This fall, the Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York will introduce Sally, an AI-powered humanoid robot, to high school classrooms to assist educators and students in specialized robotics courses.
• Serving roughly 1,300 students, 79 percent economically disadvantaged, the district participates in the Woz ED STEM Pathway program and purchased the robot from Realbotix for $57,590.
• Realbotix CEO Andrew Kiguel said the robot features a “lifelike appearance” and uses “education-specific safety guardrails” to provide personalized support, with students accessing 24/7 homework help via unique identification codes.
• In an official statement posted earlier this month, the school district confirmed the robot will “never replace teachers, staff members, or meaningful human interaction” and will not store personal student data or record video.
• While some praise the initiative as innovative, critics warn that classroom AI could exacerbate inequality in underserved populations, marking a significant test for embodied artificial intelligence in live educational environments.

Jonah Goldberg:

I spent part of the week at Liberalism for the 21^stCentury—LibCon 2026—an annual conference put on by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, a relatively new organization headed by my friend Shika Dalmia, long associated with Reasonmagazine and now publisher of the UnPopulist.

I am interested in opportunities for right-left collaboration on issues such as the rule of law, free speech, free trade, and similar things that traditionally fall under the heading “liberalism,” and so I try to go to things like this when I can. They are, as we say around here, worth our time.

The lineup presented some opportunities for political intermixing: There were familiar libertarian types such as Dalmia and Walter Olson of the Cato Institute, left-liberal types such as Ezra Klein and Danielle Allen, idiosyncratic liberals such as Francis Fukuyama and Yascha Mounk, and a fair number of regular ol’ conservatives, including me, David French, and Bill Kristol. I can hear the keys clicking as emails are written denouncing the last of these, or, at the very least, tartly informing me that he is no longer a conservative; about that I will write only that while he and I may have some wide and deep disagreements about the best way to approach the current political moment in these United States, in conversation Bill Kristol strikes me as being, if anything, more conservative in the genuine sense of that word than he was 20 years ago—more skeptical, less ideological, free from party feeling, more interested in preservation and continuity, etc. 

It is a good mix, but an uneasy one. 

I try to put on a friendly face when I encounter some of the lefty types here, many of whom I have exchanged some pretty harsh words with in the past. There is nothing in particular that I wish to retract, but this is a conciliatory occasion. My efforts meet with decidedly mixed results. I do not blame my interlocutors for this: My attempts to be friendly must seem as disturbing and unnatural to them as it does to me.

Erin Gretzinger:

Two ad hoc committees plan to hold virtual public hearings Thursday to get feedback on a list of community proposals submitted for renaming Lindbergh Elementary on the northeast side and Elvehjem Elementary on the east side. Both schools are named after controversial figures.

Charles Lindbergh, a pioneering American pilot and former University of Wisconsin-Madison student, made antisemetic statements and in 1938 accepted a medal from the Nazi government. Conrad Elvehjem, a former UW-Madison president, signed a racial covenant in the 1930s preventing Black people from owning homes in his neighborhood.

Lindbergh died in 1974, while Elvehjem died 1962. The schools have been named after both for decades.

The School Board approved establishing two committees in March to pursue renaming the schools. The district typically limits the number of renamings to two per school year.

———

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Wenyuan Wu:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Universities in the West today would be tragically unrecognizable to their medieval and early modern founders. Pursuits of truth, knowledge, scientific facts, inquiry and critical scrutiny, shared purposes of higher education rooted in both classical and modern practices, are overshadowed by the cancerous spread of subjective postmodernism.

Cancel culture and self-censorship have neutralized institutional neutrality. Professor Owen Anderson, who teaches world religions and ethics at Arizona State University, received a failing annual performance review following anonymous student complaints alleging a “Christian bias.” All the professor did, against the university’s recommendation to incorporate “decolonizing and anti-racism ideologies” into classroom instruction, was to pose scholarly questions about the theory of the “highest good” and Thomas Aquinas. The fact that Professor Anderson is a vocal critic of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), so much so as a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the school’s DEI training, contextualizes the penalty.

Last year, the University of California (UC) decided to scale back a social-justice-themed postdoctoral program that used DEI-based hiring criteria. The decision was met with a firestorm of faculty protests. Leftist professors, many of whom were hired through the program’s incentive structure to retain participating scholars, coordinated a highly effective campaign to pressure the administration. The campaign began with an open letter from anonymous “Concerned UC Faculty, administrators, staff, professorial colleagues, and constituents,” opposing the program’s elimination and supporting UC’s core values of DEI. It also included an elaborate toolkit with action alerts, talking points, a mass email campaign, and a sample press release. Subsequently, a petition with more than 1,000 signatures and endorsements from unions and nonprofits was submitted to the UC president, who was also invited to a press conference organized by the graduate student union. Unsurprisingly, UC is now reversing course and reviving the program.

Todd Wallack:

Nationally, federal projections indicate public school enrollment has already started to decline from its peak in 2019 and will continue to do so in coming years. From 2019 to 2031, schools were projected to lose nearly 4 million students. And those estimates were made before the Trump administration made changes to sharply curb immigration, further

reducing the number of kids at some schools.
Some districts are also coping with population shifts, as families move to the suburbs or other parts of the country.

In addition, Roza noted that families in some parts of the country, such as Florida, have enrolled their children in private schools, taking advantage of taxpayer-funded vouchers and scholarship programs offered in a growing number of states, or charter schools, which are publicly funded but generally operate with some degree of autonomy.
All that means more closures, sometimes year after year. School administrators acknowledge that the moves can be hard on students, families and neighborhoods.
“It’s very difficult,” said Philadelphia Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. “Public schools have always been anchors of communities.”
The Philadelphia district said schools have 70,000 more seats than are needed because of enrollment declines, and many of its aging school buildings need repairs.
In May, Philadelphia’s school board voted to close 17 schools, rejecting a recommendation to cut even more. Students, teachers and others rallied before the meeting to try to stop the closures.
To ease the burden on families, Watlington said Philadelphia decided to gradually close campuses over the next decade to give students time to graduate from their current schools. The district also created a transition office to help families affected by the changes.

Eugene Volokh:

Academics need to sell the public on the value of their project. They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas. Many people in academia do understand this, including the administrators who commissioned {the “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” commissioned by Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis}.

But many others are still clueless. Even if they grasp, dimly, that something is seriously amiss, they do not understand what it will take to fix the problem. Their idea of a solution is to imperiously inform Americans they arewrong: wrong that academia has let politics infect its work, wrong that reform is needed, and wrong that there are two sexes, male and female.

Trevor Griffey:

Contrary to what most journalists and many academics argue, an “oversupply” of people with PhDs is not the primary cause of the decline of tenure for college facultyin the U.S.

First, there is not a large “oversupply” of people with PhDs for faculty jobs in higher education, if we include non-tenure track jobs in our estimate of the “job market” for faculty. And why would we exclude those jobs? The vast majority of college faculty in the United States today are ineligible for tenure. As Marc Bousquet argued in his 2008 book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation: “We are not overproducing PhDs; we are underproducing jobs. There is plenty of work in higher education for everyone who wants to do it. The problem is that this enormous quantity of work no longer comes in the bundle of tenure, dignity, scholarship and a living wage we call a ‘job.’” (pp. 40-41)

Second, analysis of non-tenure track employment for college faculty reveals that the replacement of faculty teaching jobs with gigs has gone hand-in-hand with the systematic devaluation of the PhD as a credential for teaching college courses in humanities, social science and STEM fields (PhDs are not generally necessary to teach in a number of professional fields). People with PhDs not only face fierce competition for tenure track positions in their fields, but must also compete with doctoral students and people with terminal Masters degrees for teaching positions off the tenure track. This has effectively undermined the bargaining position of many people who receive PhDs, and reduced college student access to instructors who have ever published original scholarship in the fields that they teach in.

Stuart Hall, Jordan T. Camp:

In September 1974, at a protest in London, Stuart Hall delivered a speech in support of fellow Caribbean-born radical intellectual Walter Rodney. After being offered a professorship at the University of Guyana, Rodney had resigned from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to accept the job. As he returned home to join his wife Patricia and their children in Guyana, Rodney was informed that the offer had been rescinded under pressure from the government of Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham. A revised version of Hall’s remarks was recently discovered in the Stuart Hall Archive at the University of Birmingham; they are published here for the first time.

The “Reinstate Walter Rodney Now!” protest in London was just one episode in a global solidarity movement that erupted in support of Rodney, who by that point had established an international reputation following the publication of The Groundings with My Brothers (1969) and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). His scholarship focused on exploitation by the “colonial capitalist system.” Yet Rodney also argued that formal independence, including Guyana’s, was not the fulfillment of anticolonial struggle: on the contrary, it had resulted in the ascension of a governing class—exemplified by Burnham’s rule—that spoke the language of national liberation and socialist movements while advancing interests contrary to those of workers and peasants. Independence, Rodney warned, had not fundamentally altered the “map of the world” or shifted the material conditions of the masses.

The year 1974 was a pivotal historical moment—or as Hall and Rodney might say, a conjuncture. That year, Rodney became a member of the newly formed Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, a multiracial class alliance formed to resist the U.S.-backed Burnham dictatorship. The organization challenged the Burnham regime’s nationalist narratives, which portrayed racial conflicts between African and Indian working people as inexorable features of Guyanese society. For this work, Rodney and his comrades were subject to multiple arrests and harassment.

re: Jess Coleman, The Supreme Court’s Originalists Are Cracking Up, TNR (July 7, 2026), <https://newrepublic.com/article/212556/supreme-court-originalism-trump-barbara>. 

In Trump v. Slaughter (2026), the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority opinion announced: “[I]n Federalist No. 77, Hamilton said that the Senate’s consent ‘would be necessary to displace as well as to appoint,’ but it remains a subject of scholarly debate whether Hamilton meant ‘displace’ in the sense of ‘remove’ or ‘replace.’” Jess Coleman objects. Coleman affirms the correctness of the ‘displace’-means-‘remove’ position, and he announces that the contrary position is ‘bizarre.’ 

I have argued in academic journals since 2010, that is, long before Trump entered politics, that Hamilton’s ‘displace’-language means ‘replace’ and not ‘remove.’ Those who argue that ‘displace’ means ‘remove’ tend to clip only one sentence from Federalist No. 77, but if you read the entire paragraph in which that sentence appears, you will see that the discussion is better understood as involving replacing officers, as opposed to simply removing them. See <The Avalon Project : Federalist No 77>. 

Furthermore, in his celebrated Commentaries on the Constitution, Joseph Story affirmed that Hamilton’s ‘displace’-language was about replacing, as opposed to removing, officers. See <THE NEW REFORM CLUB: Strained (and Sloppy) Readings of the Constitution and Strained (and Sloppy) Readings of Hamilton’s Federalist No. 77 (Updated)>. More recently, it has come to light that, in his private correspondence to Senator Webster, Chancellor James Kent affirmed that Hamilton’s ‘displace’-language was speaking to replacing, as opposed to removing, officers. See <https://reason.com/volokh/2025/11/20/chancellor-james-kent-on-hamiltons-federalist-no-77-and-modern-academic-commentary/>. 

Chun Han Wong:

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is employing the sort of autocratic tactics once wielded by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to stamp out opposition and stack the leadership with acolytes as he prepares to extend his reign.

In a throwback to the most powerful Communist leaders of the 20th century, Xi has purged dozens of senior officials—even his own protégés—overseen the growth of a cult of personality and demanded absolute loyalty.

His goal: dictate China’s destiny for years to come in order to expand the country’s power and match the U.S. in military might and economic clout. Now in his 14th year as party leader, the 73-year-old Xi has eliminated conventions put in place after Mao to prevent a return to one-man rule.

But such strongman tactics come with risks. In squelching debate and stoking a climate of fear, Xi has made policymaking more arbitrary and mistakes harder to correct. Without clear succession planning, Xi also risks the fate that befell Stalin and Mao, whose deaths in office unleashed struggles for power that ended up unraveling their political visions.

Carl Campanile:

New York is spending more on education than any state in the nation despite shrinking schools and 12% fewer students than 15 years ago, an eye-opening new report found.

Empire State enrollment could see another double-digit decrease by 2031 as population growth stagnates and birth rates plummet — which would mean New York is shedding students faster than anywhere in the US except California and New Mexico, according to the report by budget watchdog the Citizens Budget Commission. 

The reckoning will force policymakers to consider controversial decisions: closing or merging schools and reducing staff or continuing to prop up facilities with a dearth of students, the report said.

———

Value Proposition Tracker

New York State and its localities also collect more from taxpayers than any other state and spend the third most per capita in the country. While this delivers the nation’s highest average per-student spending, it produces middling performance. The State’s broad and deep social safety net has been critical to supporting economic opportunity, but outcomes have not always kept pace with spending.

———

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Shannon Whitwort:

“It’s not all of them, but it’s always them,” is something I hear constantly. This means that every time you hear about some sort of antisocial behavior, the perpetrator is almost always a black person acting like a fool.

My kids aren’t doing that, and I cannot imagine under what circumstances they would, given they know the consequences my wife and I would impose as parents. I talk to my children, especially my son, about being situationally aware and leaving a scene well before anything bad develops. 

Similarly, I teach at Milwaukee Lutheran Middle & High School, where 97 percent of the student body is inner-city, economically disadvantaged black kids. The entire staff, from the principal, the teachers and the counselors to the people in the lunch kitchen are constantly talking to our students about following a more Christ-like life, making better choices. We teach them that grown, mature people don’t fly off the handle at the slightest provocation or resort to violence or other foolishness.

Our school is not immune from these problems, but I personally believe that constant messaging does make a difference with most of our students. I spent over 22 years as a litigator, with a number of those years being a prosecutor or in criminal defense. I believe this experience in the criminal justice system provides me with insight into how people are motivated to make the decisions that wind them up in the system.

Scott Niederjohn, Ph.D

Interestingly, I first met Mark in the offices of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI), the predecessor to the Badger Institute. At the time, I was an economics doctoral student, and Mark was a professor of education at UW-Milwaukee. That chance meeting changed both of our lives, but especially mine. Over the years, we went on to publish three books, more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, countless op-eds, a few economics curricular materials, and six Badger Institute reports (and Mark co-authored another five studies for the Institute as well). More importantly, I found a mentor and one of my closest friends.

Mark was an absolute giant in the field of economic education. He authored or co-authored much of the core curriculum developed by the Council for Economic Education that K-12 teachers continue to use today. His curriculum vitae was among the most impressive you will ever see, with more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.

Mark was also a unicorn — the rare professor in a major school of education who championed free markets and school choice. He advocated for phonics-based reading instruction, a reduced role for Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction in teacher licensing, market-oriented economic education for all Wisconsin students, and expanded educational choice.

Alison Somin:

A Washington Post essay highlights an important concept but falls short.

‘Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan famously wrote in his dissent in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. It would take decades to dismantle the Jim Crow system of racial segregation challenged in that case. Through those years, Harlan’s vision of colorblindness shone as a moral North Star to the civil rights movement.

Yet recently, the Washington Post published a storytitled, “How ‘colorblind Constitution’ went from conservative notion to legal pillar.” Its subheadline reads: “The once-obscure concept has been cited in recent landmark Supreme Court cases, but some …

Adele Uphaus:

The Spotsylvania School Board on Monday voted against implementing pre-hire drug testing of employees, but also voted against postponing discussion of the topic indefinitely.

A motion to develop a policy for implementing drug testing of new hires and rehires who work directly with students in any capacity failed by a vote of 4-to-3, as did a substitute motion to consider implementing testing only of new hires and rehires who work with elementary and special education students.

Board members Larry DiBella (Berkeley), Rich Lieberman (Lee Hill), and Lorita Daniels (Salem) supported both motions, while Belen Rodas (Chancellor), Carol Medawar (Courtland), and Jennifer Craig-Ford (Battlefield), joined board chair Megan Jackson (Livingston) in voting against them.

“I do struggle with this,” Jackson said. “As a parent, I was shocked to learn that we don’t do this. But from a school board member lens, it doesn’t seem like the best idea…  I think the sentiment is good, but I think we have also learned that your knee-jerk reactions are not always in the best interest of the school division.”

Adam Goldstein & Greg Lukianoff:

Canada is steadily transforming free expression from a right into a privilege — one that regulators, tribunals, and government officials can withdraw whenever they decide another interest matters more

Maybe. But two things happened at once here, and both are bad.

First, the categorical safe harbor is gone — so whether a sermon or a quoted verse is protected now depends on context, audience, and how a prosecutor reads the room. Second, in the horse-trading that got the bill through Parliament, the government also dropped the longstanding requirement that the Attorney General personally sign off before a hate-speech charge can proceed. In the absence of these two barriers, clergy and ordinary believers now get to wonder, in advance, whether saying the quiet part of their faith out loud will be read as hatred by someone with the power to charge them.

American law has a name for what happens when people must guess what they are allowed to say and, because of the uncertainty, end up not saying anything at all: a chilling effect. We have little doubt Canadians will feel that chill, even in wildfire season.

There’s more. Close behind the Combatting Hate Bill, a new Ottawa bylaw taking effect August 1 will mandate a 50-meter “bubble zone” (that’s about 164 freedom feet) around schools, hospitals, places of worship, daycares, and care homes. Inside the bubble, protest is simply banned. Not “protest that blocks the door,” or “protest that disrupts planned events,” but any protest at all. A councillor actually proposed narrowing the mandate to only prohibit conduct that actually obstructs access, and the motion lost. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Canada’s analogue to the ACLU, warned that two people standing on a sidewalk reading a pamphlet about peace would now be in violation of this bill. This is an intentionally broad blanket ban on expression that was once protected in Canada.

Ed Zagorski:

The Watertown Unified School District has some work to do, according to student and parent surveys reviewed last week by School Perceptions Senior Research Director Derek Gottlieb and the WUSD Policy Committee.

Out of 2,061 surveys sent to students, 1,393 responded, representing a 68% return rate.

Students’ overall satisfaction with District schools was 5.91 (on a scale of 0-10), down from 6.06 last year.

Gottlieb said 2,935 parent surveys were sent out and 409 parents responded, resulting in a 14% response rate.

WUSD parents were surveyed on a scale of 0-10 regarding their likelihood to recommend schools to friends and family members. Eleven percent of parents responded extremely unlikely, while another 11% responded extremely likely. Twenty-two percent were neutral, bringing the overall score to 5.61. This is a 16.3% decrease from last year’s score of 6.74.

Regarding the school district’s educational excellence, the parent rating was 3.07 in 2026 (on a scale of 1-5), down 8.1% from 3.34 last year.

On another question, “The school board is doing what it takes to make our district successful,” parents scored 2.08 in 2026. This score is a 24.9% decrease from last year’s 2.72.

———

315 Watertown 4k-3rd graders scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Susan Svrluga, Danielle Douglas-Gabriel:

Those critics want the elite university to follow Harvard in fighting federal ultimatums. Yale has been accused of racial discrimination in medical school admissions.

University President Maurie McInnis publicly acknowledged last week that the school was in talks with the Justice Department, which concluded that Yale’s medical school discriminated based on race, favoring Black and Hispanic applicants over White and Asian ones. Critics say the department cherry-picked data and used flawed legal arguments, but the investigation expanded to Yale’s law school and undergraduate campus.

Austin Berg:

Just 27 students are enrolled at Frederick Douglass Academy, which was built to serve more than 1,000 kids.

Frederick Douglass learned to read in secret.

He understood from a young age that literacy was, in his words, “the pathway from slavery to freedom.”

But at Frederick Douglass Academy High School in Chicago, the school is so under-enrolled that Illinois cannot publicly report how many of its students read proficiently. There simply aren’t enough tested students to publish the results without risking their anonymity.1

Douglass Academy has 47 classrooms built to serve 1,008 kids. But only 27 students are enrolled there. 

At 3% utilization, it is the emptiest big-city school in the country, according to Chicago Policy Center research.2

Meanwhile, CPS personnel records show Douglass currently employs 28 full-time staff members.3

In a district that once served nearly 600,000 studentsand now serves 312,000, and where one-third of school buildings sit at least half empty, Douglass illustrates the consequences of poor facilities planning: fewer opportunities for students and higher costs for taxpayers.

If a student in Illinois misses more than 10% of school days in a year, they are considered chronically absent. At Douglass, 100% of seniors are chronically absent.

And while the state couldn’t report test scores for the most recent school year, not a single 11th-grade student at Douglass could read or perform math at grade level in the 2023-2024 school year.

This isn’t due to underfunding. In the 2023-24 school year, Douglass spent $93,000 per student.

The real issue is simple: Research has long shown that very small high schools struggle to provide the breadth of academic courses and extracurricular opportunities available at larger schools.

——

More.

Sean Stevens:

Both sides do it, but not in the same way.

“Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature,” said the late Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer Philip Kerby. “Sex is a weak second.”

The data say Kerby was right.

FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database has now documented 2,057 attempts to prevent or punish campus expression since 1998, and one fact immediately stands out: censorship campaigns are remarkably bipartisan.

Of the total, 985 attempts came from the right of the expression while 952 came from the left. The rest came from both, from actors whose ideology could not be identified, or they involved non-ideological disputes.

But while censorship efforts from the left and the right occur with similar frequency, they take fundamentally different forms.

Efforts from the left typically originate on campus and are usually led by students, while efforts from the right typically originate off campus and are usually led by activist groups, public officials, or wealthy donors. Efforts from the left tend to use op-eds, social media, and online petitions to get their message across while efforts from the right threaten budgets, launch investigations, and demand resignations.

Another major difference is that efforts from the left tend to be more successful — about 50% succeed, compared to only about 40% from the right.

——

Greg Lukianoff

Some usual suspects who like to pretend things aren’t that bad on campus saw the data—showing that roughly 70% of students think professors should be reported for saying “offensive” things—and immediately countered with, “Oh, they’re only saying that about when professors sexually harass them!”

No, they aren’t. The students mean forbidden opinions even if they are, in fact, correct.

I featured the NDSU data a while back but thanks to Stu for sharing it more broadly.

——-

More:

There are so many corners of higher education that have zero interest in helping themselves regain credibility.

Mark Cuban:

But wait. North Carolina seems to know it’s not the perfect deal.
On July 10, 2026, the plan’s board voted to hand the job back to Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC. The new contract starts January 1, 2028 and runs through December 31, 2031, with two optional one-year extensions. Until then, Aetna keeps running the plan through the end of 2027.
What we know: Blue Cross won both jobs this time — medical administrator and pharmacy benefit manager, replacing CVS Caremark. The state expects roughly $12 billion in costs over three years and claims about $1 billion in savings. The state also toughened the process: it canceled the first bidding round in April 2026 because no bid met its minimum requirements, and on the pharmacy side Blue Cross was the only bidder that met them all. Separately, new “preferred provider” deals with UNC Health and Novant Health start in 2027, steering members toward those systems with lower out-of-pocket costs.
What we don’t know yet — because the actual contract documents haven’t been made public: whether the new deal fixed the pennies-on-the-dollar problem, what Blue Cross actually promised on discounts and cost growth, what happens if it breaks those promises, and what the pharmacy pricing terms look like. We also don’t know what it means for one company to now hold the medical contract, the drug contract, and the network design all at once — less conflicted than the CVS arrangement, but a lot of eggs in one basket. Last time, the state posted every contract document publicly about seven weeks after the award. If it does that again, taxpayers will be able to check the fine print for themselves by early fall.

———

and

All you need to know is that after all the legal changes and scrutiny thrown at PBMs and insurance companies, NOT A SINGLE ONE has said they will result in lower costs for employers or patients.

———

Healthcare cost are putting an extreme pressure on school districts’ finances ($94,500,000 in Madison!)

More.

Handre:

The unreadability is the point. Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who helped design the thing, admitted in 2013 that “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and credited “the stupidity of the American voter” for its passage. You couldn’t debate what you couldn’t read, and Congress couldn’t be held accountable for text it delegated to unelected agencies to write after the vote. This is legislation as fog machine. Complexity becomes a moat.

Ask yourself who swims in that moat comfortably. Not you. Not your doctor. UnitedHealth and Aetna employ floors of compliance lawyers who parse those 20,000 pages for a living, and every page raises the cost of entry for any upstart insurer who thinks he can serve customers better. No central planner can possess the dispersed knowledge to price medical care for 330 million people. The regulators know this too, at some level. Their answer wasn’t humility. Their answer was paperwork: an estimated 165 million hours of it annually, a tax paid in human lifetimes.

Stuart Loren

Chicago’s pension funds just had the kind of year that’s supposed to fix things. Returns came in between 11% and 14%. Contributions hit records, including $272 million in supplemental payments. And yet, according to the city’s annual financial report, our pension debt grew — up $500 million from what the city reported last year, to $36.4 billion. If a banner year cannot reduce that shortfall, it’s fair to ask whether this system is sustainable.

That said, there was some improvement. The funded ratio rose from 25.4% to 28.1%, driven by asset growth of 14%, while liabilities grew just 3%. The catch is scale: The funds hold only $14 billion of assets against $51 billion of liabilities.

At that size, more than $3 billion went just toward servicing existing obligations, consuming nearly every dollar the city and its employees paid in. Real progress belongs to the funding schedule: For example, the police fund is now on pace to hit its statutory funding target. But that schedule only works by growing the taxpayer’s bill every year for decades.

As a result, pensions are crowding out spending on essential services. In 2025, the city paid $2.9 billion into its four funds — 23.5% of its entire operating budget. Over $900 million came from the $6 billion corporate fund — the discretionary pot at the center of recent spending fights. Property taxes tell the same story: Over 80% of the city’s portion of the levy goes toward pensions. 

Peter Thiel & Sam Wolfe:

Ironically, an honest discussion of our apocalyptic moment would have resonated most powerfully with young people. They understand and fear the existential dangers of climate change, artificial intelligence, demographic collapse, and nuclear weapons. Benedict could have taught the young the particularities of the biblical apocalypse, including the totalitarian peace and safety that precede it. Such a discussion would have revealed reasons for hope, as we seek the bravery to “be not troubled” (Matt. 24:6). One cannot imagine a more qualified person than Benedict to lead such a conversation. Now we must make do without him.

It is not my place to tell the Church what time it is. Benedict already did that, as this essay, which I wrote with my friend Sam Wolfe, attempts to show. My humble hope is that others might succeed where Benedict failed, in answering the question: Facing the hour of darkness, how can we recover faith in the future?

Eschatology enraptured the young Joseph Ratzinger. Sometimes autobiography disguises itself as biography; this is a rule to remember when reading Ratzinger’s 1957 The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (his Habilitationsschrift, which qualified him for a professorial appointment in the German university system). He wrote that “Bonaventure’s theology of history presents a struggle to arrive at a proper understanding of eschatology. . . . [T]he theology of history does not represent an isolated area of Bonaventure’s thought. On the contrary, it is related to the basic philosophical and theological decisions which provided the basis for his participation in the bitter controversies of the 1260’s and 1270’s.” Ratzinger excavated these “controversies” because he thought that “it would not be difficult to work out applications to the present,” even seven centuries later. “Precisely at the present moment,” he added, “­theology has every reason for remaining in ­contact with its own history.” He chose not to identify those applications and those reasons, because “the task of the historian is to present his findings and nothing but his findings. . . . At times this limitation has disturbed me.”

Whatever its limitations, Ratzinger’s exposition of Bonaventure established his genius. It translates Bonaventure’s medieval density for the modern mind. As he proceeds, Ratzinger seems to be on the point of adjudicating questions the Church has ­neglected for centuries, questions reaching to Christianity’s mysterious core. At this core lies the problem to which Ratzinger devoted the final ­section of his treatise: How and when will the world end?

J.D. Tuccille:

Give the world’s control freaks credit where it’s due: No matter how creepy their proposals are, there’s always another nanny someplace eager to double down with an even more intrusive scheme. So, as Americans debate the wisdom of drunk-driver kill switch mandates for cars, their counterparts in Europe now require that new vehicles include in-car cameras that constantly monitor drivers. The result is an escalating race in government-dictated automobile surveillance that we’ll all have to pay for, even if we plan to bypass or sabotage it once we’re off the lot.

Helen Pluckrose:

Writing before Herbert’s arrest, Kevin Lister, a maths teacher who lost his job for refusing to honour a trans-identified student’s pronouns, responded in the way a liberal should. He defended the free speech of a trans activist whose movement had championed the very principles that contributed to his dismissal and had done so in a highly authoritarian way. I greatly admire Mr. Lister for that consistency. It would have been easy for someone with his experiences to become authoritarian in turn—or simply remain silent and enjoy the schadenfreude—but he did neither. Lister wrote:

This has got nothing to do with Aberdeen University, I don’t even know why they are investigating it.



He should not be sacked for his vile and ignorant posts because to do so continues the terrible attacks on free speech that are happening in the UK.



Instead he should be free to demonstrate his ignorant and self centred behaviours. The only things Aberdeen University should be interested in is that he is not allowed into women’s spaces and he is not allowed to compel anyone’s speech such that they must use his language.



Equally, staff and students at Aberdeen University should be entitled to express their views on what they want to see happen to him without fear of reprisal.



This is at the core of my coming case at the Upper Tribunal against the DBS.



I have been kept on the Children’s Barred List for posting concerns on social media about the sexualisation of the class room, buying babies on line, and the social transitioning of children.

Tracy Jan and Holly McDede:

The Trump administration has launched a national crackdown on how school districts handle accusations of sexual misconduct by teachers, following a KQED-ProPublica investigation into California’s teacher disciplinary system.

In guidance issued last week, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon cited the news outlets’ reporting in May that California’s teacher licensing agency has not revoked the professional credentials of at least 67 educators who school districts determined had sexually harassed students or committed other types of sexual misconduct. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools.

McMahon threatened to withhold federal funding from public schools that fail to protect children from teacher sexual misconduct. She called on states and school districts to scrutinize their laws and regulations to prevent educators who have engaged in sexual misconduct involving students from obtaining new positions elsewhere. Citing previous reports by the Government Accountability Office and other studies, McMahon said the Department of Education has observed a “troubling and recurring pattern” of credible reports of sexual abuse and harassment by school employees going uninvestigated. 

“Unfortunately, many administrators and State educational regulators have apparently preferred to sweep these incidents under the rug and have ‘pass[ed] the trash’ to another school,” McMahon wrote in an open letter to state schools chiefs on Friday, referring to teachers who go on to work in different schools after findings of sexual misconduct.

McMahon said the Department of Education intends to increase its monitoring of school systems to ensure that they comply with federal law. The Trump administration will also examine states’ laws and regulations to determine their effectiveness in protecting students, she said. 

Daniel Cody

A Florida student accumulated a monumental 11.99 GPAthrough an atypical high school routine, prompting local schools to change how they weigh courses.

The high marks by Vaibhav Bhaskar, who is on his way to Duke University to study finance and economics, earned him a new state record, beating out the Sunshine State’s previous top 11.84 grade point average, according to the Palm Beach Post. 

To keep track of his ambitious milestones, Bhaskar relied on a physical reminder of his objectives. 

“I have a whiteboard in my room, and I listed five goals on it for my high school career back when I was a sophomore,” Bhaskar told The Post, noting that his top aims were to “become valedictorian” and “break the state GPA record.” 

Soulmate Keynes:

Most weeks since my eldest child was born three and a half years ago, I have filled in the parenting spreadsheet. At the time of writing, it has over 1,000 rows, with a “P” to mark every morning, afternoon and evening of parenting that my husband and I have done. It also includes a chart illustrating which of us is in credit (me) and by how much (as of today, 7.5 days and 24 bedtimes).

Let’s just say that it wasn’t my husband’s idea. “It’s at a time in our lives when we don’t exactly need more admin,” he told me on Sunday evening, during a formal interview conducted in our living room. Still, he has no plans to stop logging his hours. The spreadsheet monitors how close we are to fulfilling our shared objective: dividing childcare as evenly as we can.

I have struggled to find data describing how unusual we are. Not for having the spreadsheet — I know that’s weird. But for wanting to share the job of parenting evenly between us. Traditional attitudes towards child-rearing have softened over time, but surveys of Britons still suggest that our arrangement, of both parents working full time while our children are young, is frowned upon by many.

Dave Shiflett:

By some measures America’s 250th birthday puts a worthy notch in the historic timeline. A quarter-millennium is respectable, but we’re young compared with the oldest republic (San Marino, founded in 301) and a blink of the eye for Egypt, which unified into a single state more than 5,000 years ago. Closer to home, modern Canada is 159 years old, while Mexico counts 205 years since its independence from Spain.

Mom, more widely known as Peggy, recently attended a family gathering that included an 8-month-old great-grandson named Charlie and Charlie’s other living great-grandmother, Jody. Both grandmas reminded me how young America is and how much it has changed, mostly for the better.

Using mom’s life span as a yardstick puts things in perspective. Go back 98 years from her birth in 1928, and you’re at 1830, a mere 54 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed and 31 years before the start of the Civil War, during which mom’s grandfather would serve in Robert E. Lee’s signal corps. Go back one more life span and it’s 1732, the year George Washington was born.

Her life, like America’s, has been rich in challenges. Her father deserted the family early on, leaving her mother to raise two daughters at a time when women were at a significant disadvantage in the job market. They never owned a car and for a time had to cook meals on a hot plate. “We were poor,” mom is fond of saying, “but we didn’t know we were poor.” She and her sister later went to college on scholarships and lived out their own American Dreams. Her sister, who went to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had a daughter who became a plastic surgeon and a son who became a doctor. Mom’s kids did well too, save for the son who became a hack writer.

Michael B. Horn:

For years I’ve hoped that school districts could take a page from other industries and “disrupt” themselves to optimize learning for each and every child.

I’ve changed my mind.

It’s not because districts can’t innovate. They can, and many do.

But a proper application of disruptive innovation theory shows that the vast majority of existing school districts will not drive the disruptive innovation needed to transform the education sector in the United States—not because they lack visionary leaders, but because districts themselves are the incumbent business model.

For those who haven’t followed all my past work on this topic, a bit of grounding.

Kerry McDonald

For Layla Coyne, choosing to attend a microcollege was a natural extension of her unconventional K-12 schooling experience. As a middle schooler, she left a traditional public school to attend Rock Tree Sky, a self-directed learning community in Southern California that offers part-time programming for local homeschoolers and charter school students. For high school, she continued at Rock Tree Sky while enrolling at Summit School, a public independent study program offered through the Ojai Unified School District. She also took dual enrollment courses through a community college and spent nearly a year studying in Paraguay. 

After graduation, Coyne continued taking community college courses while pondering her next steps. It was then that she discovered Thoreau College, a microcollege in rural Wisconsin, that offers summer and semester-long programs blending homesteading and agricultural skills with academic inquiry. After attending the month-long summer program, she knew she wanted to return for the full semester experience. “I just loved every part of it,” said Coyne, who was one of five students in the fall 2024 semester cohort. 

Thoreau College is one of several microcolleges that have opened in recent years, offering intentionally small, immersive programming and expanding the landscape of higher education possibilities. As the higher education sector struggles with declining public confidence, enrollment challenges and institutional closures, microcolleges emerge as a creative, collaborative model for post-secondary education.

At the microcollege, Coyne and her peers learned skills such as sheep-shearing, foraging and fire-making, while also reading and discussing the works of Wendell Berry, Henry David Thoreau, Robin Wall Kimmerer and other nature-focused authors. “I think the intention of having a small community-based school is something that is very much desired at this moment when a lot of the world is getting more and more isolated,” she said. 

Average tuition for Thoreau College’s semester-long program is about $8,500, with additional fees if students wish to obtain college credit through a new partnership between Thoreau and Prescott College, a private, experiential college in Arizona.

By Becky Jacobs

About a month ago, a major chilled water line ruptured near the Charter Street Healing and Cooling Plant. The pipe was part of a system that provides air conditioning for much of campus, including academic buildings, research facilities and hospitals.

“The damaged section of pipe has been removed, and work is underway to install a permanent replacement,” Deej Lundgren, the UW system’s associate vice president for capital planning and budget, told the Board of Regents during a virtual meeting Thursday.

UW-Madison continues to calculate the total cost of the repairs and determine what caused the break. The university may seek additional funding from the UW system in the future, Lundgren said. The pipe was 4 feet in diameter and buried 20 feet underground, which made it “very challenging to get at,” he said.

“In partnership with the state of Wisconsin, it was determined that the current Engineering Drive utility project could be used to support the repair efforts,” Lundgren said.

Anna Gross, Daniel Thomas and Rachel Rees: 

A top US lawmaker has urged the UK culture secretary to detail her plans to make big social media companies give greater prominence to trusted news sites, as American authorities push back against perceived attacks on free speech in Europe.

In a letter to Lisa Nandy, Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, warned that the proposals risked creating “a tiered information system” and called for a formal briefing by July 28, when a new culture secretary is likely to be in post under presumptive prime minister Andy Burnham.

Last month, the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport announced plans to give established broadcasters and media companies greater prominence on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, amid concerns about online misinformation.

Under the proposals, first reported by the FT, content from news channels including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 would have to be awarded more promotion by social media platforms’ algorithms and special rules may be implemented at times of increased social unrest.

Russell T. Warne:

Abstract

Between October 1, 1966 and December 31, 1971, a total of 341,127 men joined the military under lowered physical (9%) or mental test standards (91%). Called Project 100,000, this initiative was controversial from its first announcement and has been the subject of commentary for more than 50 years. In various discussions, Project 100,000 has been portrayed as a cynical method of meeting military needs without drafting middle-class youth, a dangerous experiment that harmed vulnerable people, and a successful employment program. This literature review explores the context and empirical research on Project 100,000. The conclusion is that Project 100,000 met some of its creators’ goals and fell short of others. Though it ended over half a century ago, Project 100,000 still provides valuable historical, theoretical, scientific, and societal lessons for both civilian and military leaders

Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D.

One interesting thread I’ve seen in many of the current screen/free play debates is the notion that growing up in the 70s/80s was a kind of youth utopia and children should be “free” (i.e., forced, possibly by government regulation) to return to those halcyon days. This is curious as, growing up during those years myself, I remember them very well. Neither parents nor children viewed those years as utopia. And government statistics generally found that youth who grew up during this period had some of the worst behavioral outcomes on record. So why are people so nostalgic?

NPR Corrections:

claimed to have uncovered $110,000 in fraud. In fact, it was $110 million in fraud.

Sudha G. Tilak

Long before photography became the visual language of empire, one Englishwoman was sketching the people she encountered across India with unusual curiosity and precision.

Emily Eden, a gifted artist and writer, belonged to one of Britain’s most influential political families. She travelled across northern India in the 1830s while accompanying her brother, George Eden, first Earl of Auckland, the governor-general of India.

Alongside princes, generals and courtiers, she drew servants, attendants, travellers, fakirs, Afghan and Sikh nobles, Akali warriors, hill communities and even the animals that accompanied imperial journeys. Her remarkably broad gaze set her apart from many contemporaries.

More than two dozen of her sketches were published in 1844 as Portraits of the Princes and People of India. They now form the heart of Princes & People, an exhibition at DAG in Delhi curated by art historian Mary Ann Prior, bringing together the complete published series of hand-coloured lithographs made from Eden’s original sketches.

Wall Street Journal:

The press is attacking the report as an attempt to censor independent museum curation, but that’s not how we read it. The 162-page “Saving America’s Story,” produced by the White House Domestic Policy Council, lays out in persuasive detail how the museum offers a largely critical view of American history that “no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated.”

Instead, the museum offers the message, captured in one exhibit, that when they founded the U.S., “early leaders envisioned a country that promised opportunity and freedom—but only for some.”

The report isn’t a cheerleading document seeking to hide America’s warts. What it seeks is a history of the U.S. that doesn’t resemble the 1619 Project in its partisan bias.

The report’s examples show the degree to which progressives have captured the history museum. In one exhibit, the Pledge of Allegiance was described as a tool to “instill American nationalism through flag ceremonies.” Nationalism? That’s a needlessly pejorative edge. How about patriotism?

John MCWhorter

Good God. Rouse genuinely thinks Fighting the Power is the essence of serious thinking, has never been questioned about it even this far into her career, and is incapable of even understanding what Lee’s questions are getting at. She’s not deflecting. She really has no idea how ridiculous she sounds.

I became an academic out of being curious about things. Gradually realizing since the 1990s that this kind of person is ordinary in the humanities and social sciences, is routinely given awards and high administrative positions, and is beyond the reach of rational discussion has been one of the most disappointing experiences of my life.

John McWhorter:

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It has become a summer rite to bemoan how few Black students are admitted to Stuyvesant and other highly competitive public high schools in New York City. And the numbers are unpleasant. This year only three of 777students admitted to Stuyvesant are Black. Last year it was eight out of 781.

Since about one in five public school students in New York City is Black, many see the paucity of Black students at what are called specialized high schools as evidence that their admission standards must be unfair. “There needs to be a real, independent investigation into the admissions process,” the Queens borough president, Donovan Richards Jr., said after the latest results were released. Many have demanded the elimination of the Specialized High School Admissions Test — the sole measure of whether a student will be admitted (except at the LaGuardia performing arts school, which uses an audition process).

Is the problem the test, or what happens before the test?

Black students often attend poorly performing schools, but so do the sons and daughters of Asian immigrants, even if undocumented, who are admitted at far higher rates than even white students.

In New York City, growing up poor or working class has never barred a child from educational excellence. Poverty rates for Black, Latino and Asian New Yorkers are not that different. But Asian students of modest means are getting into the selective high schools in healthy numbers.

Jennifer Smith Richards, Megan O’Matz, Mollie Simon and Jennifer Berry Hawes:

A decade ago, the state of Florida stripped a teacher of her license for sexual abuse of a 16-year-old boy. Last year, she opened a private school there with ease. 

Her name and photo were on her new school’s website and details of her case were easy to find with an online search.

The state also knew that a transplanted Midwesterner had been fired from her Cincinnati charter school, following felony charges related to misuse of public funds, and had been banned from teaching or running schools in Ohio. Yet Florida did not stop her from starting a private school and collecting public money.

ProPublica analyzed data from 13 states of varying sizes that do publish private school directories and offer public funding to these types of schools, and found that at least 1,500 more are listed today than were five years ago — bringing the total to more than 9,600. The numbers provide a rare look into the growth catalyzed by friendly legislatures and government money, while public school districts are losing students and closing schools. 

When public money is available, most private schools take advantage of that funding. In several states, all or nearly all students at some private schools pay tuition with public dollars. For instance, public funds subsidized 99% of all private school students in Iowa this past school year, the third year the program was available. 

An average of 100 new private schools have launched in Florida each of the last five school years. West Virginia, a state with fewer school-age students than are enrolled in Chicago Public Schools, has gained about 40 new private schools. 

And in the three years since Arkansas began allowing students to get about $7,000 annually toward tuition, about 120 new private schools opened. ProPublica detailed the consequences of the rapid growth and meager oversight in Arkansasin a previous story, spotlighting a school where students were subjected to menial labor and violence. The owner there was convicted of permitting child abuse, a felony. The state has said student safety is its top priority, but the school remains eligible to receive state money after a temporary stop.

———

Sun Prairie, Madison and Wisconsin teacher sexual abuse cases.

Tia Clinton, Benjamin K. Master, Lydia R. Rainey, AK Keskin:

Key Takeaways

• Budget shortfalls have become the top challenge U.S. public school district leaders are facing in 2026, with 54 percent of survey respondents ranking it in their top three concerns—up from 33 percent in 2025.
• Declining enrollment is also increasingly a concern among survey respondents, especially for leaders in rural districts.
• Interviewed leaders pointed to the loss of federal COVID-19 relief funds, rising costs, and state and local revenues that have not kept pace as the primary drivers of budget shortfalls.
• Leaders indicated that budget cuts have worsened other challenges in their districts, such as ensuring adequate staffing and improving reading and math achievement.
• To increase enrollment, school districts are competing for students: About 40 percent of survey respondents said that their districts are considering marketing campaigns, 33 percent are considering expanding pre-kindergarten (pre-K) services, and a similar share are considering offering new extracurriculars (e.g., sports, out-of-school programs). 
• In the face of continued enrollment decline, many public school districts will need support both to plan for long-term downsizing and to identify and invest in the services that can help them better attract and retain families.

Public school districts nationwide are navigating compounding challenges that are forcing hard decisions and placing growing pressure on leaders to adapt. In our spring 2026 American School District Panel (ASDP) survey data, we observe major shifts in the top challenges district leaders are facing, compared with 2025 survey results. Specifically, budget shortfalls and declining enrollment have risen to the top of district leaders’ concerns, even as other long-standing challenges remain pressing issues.

In this report, we examine how these challenges are affecting districts nationwide, drawing on survey findings from a nationally representative sample of public school district leaders and follow-on interviews with 38 district leaders across the United States to learn more about how they are responding to these challenges. This work is intended to provide national, state, and local policymakers—as well as the general public—timely information regarding the condition of public school systems nationwide and help inform decisions related to school funding, instructional improvement, and community engagement.

Lewis Andrews:

The financial outlook for many of America’s blue cities and states has become increasingly grim. According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the cumulative debt of local governments has grown by $1.3 trillion, or almost 50 percent, over the past decade; states and cities run by Democrats over most of that period account for two thirds of the surge.

Even more troubling is the sharp split between the way that Republican-leaning and Democratic-leaning jurisdictions are attempting to manage their budgets: the former by cutting spending and lowering taxes to attract new residents, the latter by raising taxes to cover their ever-growing deficits. Not only has this led to a widely observed migration of high earners from blue states to red ones, but according to a recent Brookings study, it has also led foreign investors to confine their financing of new US factories and office buildings to GOP-controlled areas.

Some blue governments may be closer to default than is generally supposed. Chicago is now floating bonds, not for capital improvements, but for legal settlements, worker compensation, and other operational expenses. As a February 2026 editorial in the hometown Tribuneput it, Mayor Brandon Johnson is “leaving his successors with a financial ash heap.” Meanwhile, according to a report from the respected Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, San Francisco is facing “a fiscal crisis unlike any in its history.” As for the state of California, Alpha Strategies Investment Consultants president Jay Rogers recently warned the owners of its municipal bonds against imagining they hold a safe investment. 

Dale Chu

The question of whether, when, and how public funding may flow to religious schools has been contested for more than 150 years, animated by the tension between the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which bars the state from sponsoring religion, and its Free Exercise Clause, which restricts the burdens that can be placed on religion.

Over the past 25 years, the Supreme Court has resolved that tension in stages: first holding that the Constitution does not forbid public dollars from reaching religious schools through parents’ free choices (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 2002); then that states cannot deny religious schools a benefit freely available to their secular counterparts (Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, 2017; Espinoza v. Montana, 2020); and, finally, that states cannot evade that rule by drawing a line between a school’s religious status and its religious use of funds by saying, in effect, “we will fund a religious school, but not if it does religious things with the money” (Carson v. Makin, 2022).

Now the Court has agreed to hear yet another case in this realm, St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, which raises a different and perhaps more vexing question: What happens when the free exercise of religion collides with a state’s anti-discrimination laws? How the Court answers could determine whether states may attach conditions to public benefits that religious institutions cannot, in conscience, accept.

St. Mary centers on a conflict over Colorado’s universal preschool program, which promises every family in the state a free year of early education at the provider of their choice. To participate, a preschool must sign an agreement pledging not to base its enrollment decisions on a list of characteristics that includes sexual orientation and gender identity. Two parish preschools in the Archdiocese of Denver—St. Mary’s in Littleton and St. Bernadette’s in Lakewood—say that signing such a pledge would require them to adopt policies that contradict Church teaching on marriage and the human person. The case was joined by Dan and Lisa Sheley, parents whose children attend St. Mary’s, who argue they are shut out of the universal program their own taxes help fund.

Danielle Kaeding:

Wisconsin law requires institutions to honor donor restrictions on spending those funds, as well as manage and invest them in good faith.

Norgaard argues the college didn’t do that. He said he never gave the college written consent to change restrictions on spending his endowed funds. Despite repeated written requests, he said Northland has never provided a full accounting of how funds were spent.   

“We threw everything into these two scholarships in terms of keeping (Bjorn’s) memory alive, and so it’s like a gut punch,” Norgaard said. “You feel like his legacy is somehow diminished. Money was set up, and now it’s gone.”

In a statement, Ted Bristol, chair of Northland’s board, said the college petitioned the court to distribute its remaining endowment funds in a “reasonable, fair and thoughtful manner that most closely aligns with donor intent.”

“Our petition outlines the process and reasons which led to the board’s difficult decision to close Northland College, despite our best efforts,” Bristol wrote. “We have tried to balance the interests of everyone involved affected by Northland’s closure.”

About one year before the college closed, Northland’s financial statements show the value of its endowment assets was close to $5 million — roughly $25 million less than the original restricted funds that were required to be maintained in perpetuity by donors.

Matthew Haag:

A disproportionately small number of Black and Hispanic students received admission offers to New York City’s elite public high schools for the upcoming academic year, continuing a pattern of racial and ethnic gaps that has existed for years despite promises by elected officials to address the divide.

About 62 percent of the students in the city’s public schools are Black or Hispanic. But at its eight most prestigious high schools, about 10 percent of the students in the incoming freshman class are expected to be Black or Hispanic, roughly the same as last year. About 80 percent of the seats went to Asian and white students.

At Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, often considered the most selective of the city’s specialized high schools, three of the 777 offers were made to Black students, and 21 were for Hispanic students, together representing a nearly one-third decline from the previous freshman class. One Black student was admitted to Staten Island Technical High School.

——-

Alex Berenson:

“About 19 percent of all public school students are Asian, but they received 57 percent of the offers for the specialized schools for the fall.”

In other words, white kids make up 19 percent of the NYC schools – and 23 percent of the students at the best schools. They’re barely overrepresented.

This is not about racism, it’s the opposite, it’s about Asian kids outcompeting everyone else on a one-shot exam that requires intelligence, preparation, and, ideally, parental support. The Times ITSELF admits the truth, calling the test:

“a grueling assessment of students’ mastery of math and English that rewards multistep problem-solving skills and time management.”

Dale Chu

Good evidence shows that we’re stuck in a “learning recession.” We also need to consider the likelihood of a connected recession in something indispensable to student learning, namely effective teaching.

I often invite audiences to identify the same missing word in three eerily similar quotes by reputable educators over two decades. Each laments the gradual disappearance of something central to effective schooling. By the second quote, most of the audience correctly guesses that the missing word is indeed teaching.

The most recent example comes from author and consultant Michael Sonbert, whose observations in thousands of classrooms demonstrate that, however hard they work, “teachers aren’t teaching.” That is, they rarely provide explicit, sustained, whole-class lessons.

Instead, they’re more prone than ever to facilitate—to have individuals or groups complete assignments on screens or worksheets, often at their own (sometimes dawdling) pace. Sonbert dubs this shift the “biggest trend in teaching today.” It is tacitly confirmed by the photos that dominate education publications, which illustrate the pervasiveness of group activities involving crayons and colored markers.

None of my audiences balks at these findings.

Alarmed by this trend, a superintendent and assistant superintendent in Connecticut did some digging and reported their findings in an article titled “What’s Missing in Teacher Prep.” They made two discoveries. First, that their teachers had graduated from 17 different pre-service programs. Second, that none of them had received any “practical experience” in the most vital elements of instruction—like “checking for understanding.”

Similarly, in a Fordham Institute piece in 2020 called “Training teachers to fail,” two Minnesota teachers decry the preparation they received from two well-known ed schools. “Oddly enough,” they write, “we were not trained in how to actually teach” (their emphasis). They were warned, moreover, not to be seen “at the front of the room” during observations. Good thing, as they received “minimal to nonexistent training in effective whole-group instruction.”

Susan Svrluga:

Roberto Serrano was shocked when he saw the results of the midterm exam in his advanced mathematical economics class at Brown University last semester: The average score was 96, when in the past, it had ranged from the 60s to the 80s. Nearly half of the students this year got a perfect score of 100.

Stephanie M. Lee:

A month ago, 10 high-profile scholars released a document — titled “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences” — that lit up a million scholarly group chats. The chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, vocal critics of the purported politicization of higher education, charged the group with evaluating a number of disciplines for signs of political skew. The conclusion: All the fields showed “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

But one field was singled out as “the most extreme case” — anthropology. Compared to philosophy, sociology, history, literary studies, and music studies, the discipline showed “a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” The authors cited writings from several anthropologists, a speech by a recent president of the American Anthropological Association, and an AAA panel about biological sex that was canceled in 2023, among other things. The report described itself as a summary of reports, specific to each field. (Only one, on literary studies, has been released; it was posted after this interview was conducted.)

Paul Boghossian

The idea that there is something amiss in the humanities and the social sciences, and that the problem has something to do with the politicisation of research in these areas, is hardly new. American historian Richard Hofstadter traced American scepticism about the role of university professors in public life to evangelical Protestant suspicion of the “learned clergy” during the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In more recent history, the idea reached a high-water mark during the McCarthy era, and another in the 1980s with the publication of best sellers such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987) and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (1990).

Our report does not attempt to trace the roots of the present-day critique of the academy to these antecedents. Nor does it attempt to engage in detail with contemporary critics of the humanistic academy and its defenders, a sprawling discussion that has taken place mainly online and in the press. Much of that discussion is focused on undergraduate teaching and its social consequences, a topic we address only in passing.

Claire Suddath

When I heard Vanderbilt University was opening a campus in New York, my first thought was, Well, I hope KA moved its cannon.

For decades, the Vanderbilt chapter of the Kappa Alpha fraternity had a Civil War–style cannon that it displayed sometimes on its lawn, sometimes in its basement, but usually pointed toward the North. Now that the 153-year-old Tennessee university was expanding northward, I wondered if the frat repositioned it. If not, the school would be pointing the cannon at itself.

A Vanderbilt fraternity could get away with a little the-South-will-rise-again humor back when nobody was paying much attention to it. But things are different now. Over the last few years, Vandy, as it’s affectionately known, has become one of the most desired and admired schools in the country. At a time when only 42 percent of Americans say they have a lot of confidence in higher education, and as other schools face a spate of crises — an increasingly antagonistic White House, the existential threat of AI, administrative uncertainty about how to handle student protests — the university has emerged as a bit of an apolitical fantasy land. It accepted just 2.9 percent of regular-decision applicants, and although its overall acceptance rate won’t be available until late August, a university official told me it’s expected to be about 4.8

Paul Bloom:

I really like professors. I’m a professor, my wife is a professor, and most of my friends are professors. I heard about a retirement community in Arizona that’s specifically for professors, and if I ever end up in a retirement community, that’s where I’d like to go.

It’s not just that professors are my people; I think there are objectively good things about us. We tend to be pretty smart. We are sometimes socially inept, but in a sweet way. We are genuinely excited about ideas — professors spend a lot of time thinking about questions such as the origin of the universe, the nature of truth, the evolution of species, and whether Shakespeare discovered the unconscious. We are often generous. For instance, many professors spend a lot of time mentoring students in ways that aren’t requirements of the job and don’t lead to any tangible rewards. And we are a peaceable lot. If you’re sitting at a bar, minding your own business, and some drunk takes a swing at you, the drunk is unlikely to be a professor.

But I don’t think we are very brave. We don’t tend to be troublemakers. I’m not denying that many of us say and write things that upset the public. Professors make bold and shocking claims — there is no immaterial soul; there are many genders; Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet; empathy makes the world worse; and so on. Philosophers are particularly provocative in this regard. I’ve heard them argue that babies don’t feel pain, that dogs and chairs don’t exist (because the only things that really exist are elementary particles), that atoms are conscious, and that life is terrible and we’d all be better off dead. Bold stuff!

But this boldness has its limits. It doesn’t typically extend to interactions with our colleagues. We want them to like us, and so we work to avoid their disapproval. We don’t want to make trouble.

David Cohen:

In an academic world where scholars regret seeing their cherished theories vanish into the knacker’s yard, Sir Simon Baron-Cohen is unusual in wishing people would retire one of his best-known coinages.

Baron-Cohen, one of Britain’s best-known autism experts, says he now regrets the language of his ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism. He now thinks it may have caused as much bother as good in influencing how people talk about the condition.

This is not because of the underlying science, but because the specific words themselves have proved ‘open to misunderstanding’. The phrase he came up with is now ‘too broad to be useful’, he tells The Spectator.

The soft-spoken clinical psychologist’s change of heart arrives just as the research centre he founded in 1997 is being handed a record-setting new dollop of money.

Cambridge University this week announced a £26 million gift from a US philanthropist to establish the K. Lisa Yang Centre for Autism Research, along with a dedicated autism hub at a children’s hospital in Cambridge. Baron-Cohen will help oversee both ventures. Much of the new money is earmarked for looking at why autistic people have generally poorer health and shorter lives.

Baron-Cohen first set out his famous theory in his 2003 book, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, drawing largely on journal work he had published the previous year. In it, he postulated that the capacity for empathy is the critical dividing line between men and women, and between those who are autistic and those who are not.

Wall Street Journal:

That America emerged from the revolution as a free republic at all is something of a miracle. Most revolutions end in blood and tyranny, not liberty. As historian Gordon Wood has documented, the U.S. revolution was “radical” in its ideas about liberty and the rights of man. Its ideas emerged from the British Enlightenment—David Hume, Adam Smith, John Locke—that so influenced Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.

“All men are created equal” was about as radical an idea as you could express in 1776. Yes, that equality was imperfectly realized at the time. But the seed was planted, and then nurtured in the soil of the Declaration’s call for liberty and self-government. And as Wood explains in his great book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” these ideas would spread and unleash the republican spirit of free men and women who built America.

The two Presidents after the Founders who best understood the Declaration were arguably Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge. Lincoln invoked the universal principles of the Declaration to make the case that ending slavery was essential for America to be true to its founding. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, came eventually to agree with Lincoln.

As for Coolidge, his oration in 1926 on the 150th anniversary deserves to be remembered more than it is:

Lesson Hollow

Anthropic just gave every verified K-12 teacher in America free access to a premium version of Claude that’s mapped to “academic standards in all 50 states.” When Claude for Teachers helps with a lesson, it does not invent academic standards. It reaches into a specific, public dataset and pulls from it. The dataset is called the Learning Commons Knowledge Graph, a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative project that Claude for Teachers connects to rather than one Anthropic built. It is open under a Creative Commons license, and I analyzed the entire thing, all 222,865 standard items spanning the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and the national frameworks they share.

I read it against one question, the only one that matters to a parent. Is this teaching a fact or a skill, or is it teaching a contested claim as though it were settled? What I found was three completely different kinds of bad in here, and the difference between them is not severity. It is reach. To see it, you first have to understand where these standards come from.

Where the 222,865 come from

Start with the shape of the pile, because nobody explains it and it changes everything.

At the bottom are a small number of national frameworks that almost every state builds on. Common Core supplies the math and the English. The Next Generation Science Standards, NGSS, supplies the science. A framework called C3, short for College, Career, and Civic Life, supplies the skeleton for social studies. These are the source documents, and they are compact: the Common Core math list is about 800 statements, its English list about 2,400, NGSS about 1,300, and C3 about 450.

On top of that national base sit 208 separate state frameworks, one per subject per state. And here is the part that matters. In math, science, and English, the states mostly copy the national base. When I count how many states share the exact same standard text, the most-adopted lines in the whole dataset are pure skills lifted straight from the national frameworks: “Reason abstractly and quantitatively” appears in 39 states, “Science and Engineering Practices” in 40, a trigonometry standard about sine and cosine in 41. That shared national skeleton is where the country actually agrees.

Social studies is the exception, and it is the crucial one. C3 is only a skeleton of skills, not content. It never says what history to teach. So in social studies every state writes its own standards from scratch, which is why 94% of all unique standard texts in the entire dataset turn out to be one-state originals that no other state adopted. Social studies is where a state gets to say what it wants, in its own words, accountable to no shared national text.

When you find something ugly in this data, the very next question is how many states adopted it. If the answer is one, you are looking at a local capture. If the answer is thirty, you are looking at something the national frameworks handed to everyone.

So let us sort the bad by reach.

Johanna Kurtz:

The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.

This type of failure is well understood as a threat in economics. The old joke is that when a man marries his cleaner, the GDP of both households collapses even while the actual labor being done remains the same and everyone is better off. In our case, we’re seeing the opposite: a thousand small divorces and social fragmentations which boost the appearance of GDP but leave everyone poorer in reality.

Occasionally, researchers succeed in capturing and modelling these hidden transitions, and we get a glimpse into the deep faultlines under society — direct evidence that official measures miss what households actually feel. In 2024, for example, a compelling study by Lawrence Summers and colleagues

showed

that the gap between depressed consumer sentiment and cheerful official statistics closes once borrowing costs (excluded from the modern CPI but important for family finances) are counted as part of the cost of living. The consumers were right.

What actually got cheaper over the past fifty years? Electronics, entertainment, fast fashion, processed food, toys, screens of every kind. And what got more expensive, usually by many multiples? Housing, education, childcare, healthcare, insurance.

Absurdly, both of these movements register in the statistics as progress: one shows up as asset appreciation and the other as consumer surplus. But the lived reality for families feels like a pincer.

Robert Sampson’s research on Chicago found that the collective efficacy which keeps neighborhoods safe — mutual trust plus the willingness of residents

to intervene for the common good

— is strongest where residents own their homes and stay put. Ownership is both a private good and the raw material of the social capital whose destruction started this spiral. A generation locked out of ownership is locked out of both.

Marriage follows the same pattern. Women now substantially outnumber men on university campuses and outpace them in degrees earned, yet the preference for husbands who match or exceed a wife’s income and education has not correspondingly relaxed. The result is a radical market mismatch.

Anish Acharya

Oliver Sacks had an idea late in his life that I keep coming back to. He observed that most people treat being present as the goal, as if the whole point of living were to sit inside the current second. He thought that was a little sad. The people he found most alive were soaked in the past and future at once: remembering, planning and dreaming. That’s what making does to you. It stretches you across all three tenses, because you’re building toward something you can already see, out of everything you’ve ever loved. Consuming, by contrast, parks you in the now.

Take social media. At the start it was a little miraculous: people taking the time to share what was happening and what they were thinking with each other. Then it became a contest. A call for attention. And once the algorithms took over, the thing that broke through was whatever was loudest, so people optimized for loud, and lately we’ve started calling the machine-made version of it slop.

But the feed was slop before any machine got involved. Slop is just what you get when everyone consumes and nobody creates, and the cure is people making things again, which AI is unusually good at enabling. That’s about the most anti-slop thing I can imagine. A companion you talk to and shape and argue with will do more for you than a celebrity you watch from across the internet, because one of them is a thing you make and the other is a thing that happens to you. It’s the difference between putting on an autogenerated Spotify playlist and making somebody a mixtape. A mixtape is you, smuggled into another person’s afternoon.

And this isn’t reserved for creatives. A master electrician

in Kentucky

with no computer science degree used AI to build a load-calculation tool that sells for $12.99 and replaces a $500 service call. A plumber

canceled a $40,000 consulting contract

after a single afternoon with OpenClaw got him further than the consultants had scoped in weeks. For most of computing history, if you couldn’t code, you were a consumer of other people’s ideas. That’s over. The cost of trying things has collapsed, and the people picking this up first are not the ones anyone predicted. Software is about to be everywhere the way YouTube made video everywhere, and most of it will be built by people who’d never have called themselves builders.

Auditor Allison Ball:

• JCPS lacks a current and cohesive plan that outlines district priorities and goals (finding 1.7).
• A fear of retaliation exists in the JCPS culture (finding 1.8).
• The board operates with too little focus on student outcomes (finding 2.2).
• Former Superintendent Polio had control over the internal audit process, including reviewing and filtering information (findings 3.1, 3.2, 3.6).
• Since 2016, the Board has approved the maximum allowed property tax increase annually (p. 133-139).
• Despite receiving $500 million of COVID funds through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER), in FY22, JCPS somehow began running a budget deficit (p. 142-144).
• Every working budget from FY22-26 shows expenses exceeding revenues (finding 4.18).
• In 2025, approximately 222 teaching positions were vacant. In a survey, nearly half of school-based staff agreed that vacant positions in their school made their jobs harder. School administrators and HR personnel noted delays in the hiring process, which led to hardship in finding qualified candidates for positions (findings 5.1, 5.4).  
• Despite a 62% inflation-adjusted increase in per-student revenue from 2002 to 2022, average teacher salaries only increased by 12% (finding 5.9).
• In comparison to peer-districts (ratio of 1:180 to 200), JCPS assigns more school administrators per student (1:137.5). Further, compensation for principals and assistant principals exceeds national averages (finding 5.10).
• JCPS does not have a deferred maintenance plan. In October 2025, JCPS operations leadership estimated that a budget of $2.5 billion was required to solve the district’s deferred maintenance repairs (finding 6.4).
• JCPS claims that it has $1.3 billion in unmet facility needs (p. 215).
• 26% of schools were found to be under-enrolled, meaning they were below optimal capacity (finding 6.6).
• For 2022-23 and 2024-25, 33,358 out of 42,712 behavior incidents on a bus were committed by repeat offenders (finding 7.5).
• 1/5 of all JCPS students feel unsafe at school (finding 8.10). 
• 25% of teachers observed by the exam team during school visits did not demonstrate high expectations for students (finding 9.5).
• During school visits, the exam team observed frequent Chromebook usage for instructional purposes, which does not support high-quality instruction or student engagement (finding 9.7).
• JCPS has experienced a sharper and more sustained decline in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) proficiency rates since the COVID-19 pandemic than many of its peer districts (finding 10.1).
• Kentucky Summative Assessment (KSA) results indicate that significant achievement gaps remain across multiple student subgroups within JCPS. Notably, for 3rd grade reading for the 2024-25 school year, African American students’ proficient or distinguished rate is 14 percentage points below the JCPS average, compared to 27 percentage points below the state average (finding 10.2). 
• According to the 2024-25 Kentucky Accountability System, approximately two-thirds of all JCPS schools receive an overall rating of “red” or “orange” — the two lowest of five performance levels (finding 10.3).
• JCPS is at risk of losing additional federal funding if they do not adhere to federal policy related to Diversity, Equity, & Poverty (DEP) (finding 11.1).
•  JCPS has 40 DEP employees (p. 340).

More.

Susan Miller:

Based on the most recent Survey of School District Finances from the US Census, in FY 2023, 4,522 (32%) out of the country’s 14,088 school districts ran a deficit, defined as total expenses in excess of total revenues. In aggregate, these deficits totaled $1.6 billion. And that was before the last round of ESSER funding rolled off. With falling enrollment in many district-managed schools, financial distress is poised to get much worse in the years ahead.

The great challenge facing a growing number of school districts is how they will respond to this accelerating crisis.

The situation they face is made worse by recent research findings by Marguerite Roza, the leader of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab: “Most school board trustees do not actively engage in public deliberations about budgets, and most budget items are approved with little public discussion or consideration of alternatives.”

Thus far, most districts have treated increasing financial distress at the department level, separately addressing problems of enrollment declines, falling school facility utilization, and/or growing operating costs. Yet in many districts, financial distress has worsened.

The critical issue is that these are just symptoms of the actual problem: How to keep a complex system in balance to maintain a district’s financial health in the face of accelerating and uncertain change.

Before discussing how best to solve this problem, let’s review its three major symptoms: falling enrollment, declining facility utilization levels, and increasing operating costs.

Aaron M. Renn

Americans didn’t use to have to wonder about which thinkers to turn to. We had institutions that selected, vetted, appointed, and elevated people we relied on as authoritative voices. They had processes around them, like editorial review and fact checking at publications, to ensure they did not go off the rails. The professions had an ethical code that meant something. While this system was not without its faults, and not without errors, Americans felt confident relying on network TV anchors, writers at newspapers, college professors, pastors, doctors. It was an era of high institutional trust.

That world is gone today. The institutions that sustained it have lost public trust, not entirely without warrant. Not only are official voices not trusted, but being in a position of authority today often makes the skeptical trust you even less.

People today feel left to their own devices in picking the voices they should listen to. Influencers and outsider voices are now often the authorities of choice, whether that be on personal health, relationships, or media. Even when those people are part of a major legacy institution, it’s as individuals that people trust them.

In short, trust has been devolved. People no longer have a default in trust institutions; they trust and follow individuals they’ve personally selected. People don’t believe something just because it was published in their local newspaper. They believe it because they trust the individual who said it. Because there’s no longer an institutional layer of vetting and review, the choices people make on whom to trust have a big impact on how our society functions. 

This environment makes those public intellectuals who apply to themselves individually the same standards of truth, rigor, public spiritedness, etc. that we used to rely on the institutions to supply a critical resource. That’s because the individual with a following is now a structural element in our society. So it’s not just that these public intellectuals are people individual Americans or leaders can trust, but they are supplying important support columns that disappeared with the decline of institutions in America. They are particularly needed as America passes through a period of transition in which the new and renewed institutional structures we need to build are not yet in place.

I’ve noticed that I keep turning again and again to certain public intellectuals that I find particularly compelling and fit this bill: Ross Douthat, Richard Reeves, Tanner Greer, Ryan Burge, Julius Krein, and others. Or someone I don’t know as well will write an op-ed or essay that resonates with me in the same way as those people’s work. 

I’ve often wondered if there’s a set of characteristics these people share. I’ve concluded that the answer is Yes. There is a common disposition or ethos that I sense. A common set of attributes.

Ann Althouse Summary:

“Like many terrible things, we can blame therapyspeak on America’s stupidest decade: the 1970s.”

“Back then, it was called psychobabble…. The concept survived the hedonistic ’80s, the grimy ’90s, and the low-rise aughts only to reemerge in the social media age with a new name and a more sinister purpose…. Isn’t it odd… that the most selfish people you know always seem to be the ones who are armchair diagnosing their friends and family with personality disorders? I’m reminded of the minor scandal that erupted a few years ago when an A-list actor allegedly wrote private messages to his then girlfriend telling her that if she needed to post photos of herself in a bathing suit, he was not the right partner for her. Elsewhere he wrote, ‘I’d love to know before the premiere so I’m not put in the position of publicly flaunting our love if my boundaries are going to be continued to be disrespected. That would be hurtful and triggering for me.’ The girlfriend was a professional surfer….”

Quinn Slobodian

The turn to empire is notable first for displacing a previously preferred language of mind control. After Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about Silicon Valley’s complicity in mass surveillance triggered the first phase of the so-called techlash, critics gravitated to language of behaviorism and anxieties about brainwashing from the mid-twentieth century. Our internet-connected phones and laptops had put us in Skinner boxes; we were the pigeons pecking at the pellets according to a pattern—at the mercy of “attention merchants” in “the shallows.” “The technology that connects us also controls us,” read the tagline for the influential Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. Shoshana Zuboff—who had taken classes with B.F. Skinner himself as a youngster at Harvard—warned in her 2019 bestseller The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that Silicon Valley now had “the instruments and methods that can impose Skinner’s technology of behavior across the varied domains of everyday life right down to our depths.” 

The shift from psychology to political geography is a good one. It centers questions of power and authority alongside issues of land and energy. The reliance of citizens, states, and pension funds on the financial fates of a small number of US tech companies is a startling development of the recent past. It is sensible to search for a term proportionate to our astonishment—empire talk is a rhetoric of shock. 

Tyler Tone:

The most important decisions about our lives can turn on factors ranging from unfair to downright absurd. In medieval England, a criminal facing the gallows could save their neck by reciting Psalm 51 from memory — a literacy test meant to identify clergy that became a famous loophole for accused commoners. In France, employers have long sorted job candidates by handwriting analysis, a method researchers later found predicts job performance no better than chance. In Israel, a famous study of parole boards found that favorable rulings peaked right after the judges had lunch and gradually slid toward the bottom as dinner approached. This became known as the “hungry judge effect.”Subscribe

Society has historically tackled such problems by firing bad decision-makers, passing generally applicable laws governing business practices, or — in the case of England’s “neck verse” — simply repealing the rule. Other times, we might just accept that any qualitative decision carries some inherent arbitrariness — what legal scholar Cass Sunstein and Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman called “noise“ in human judgment. Attempting to ensure good decisions by regulating the tools a decision-maker consults — as opposed to the acts and outcomes themselves — is a relatively recent societal initiative. And today, it’s coinciding with algorithms and AI bringing the same unfairness and absurdity to decision-making in digital form. 

Instead of memorizing Psalm 51 or perfecting a handwriting sample, people try to game algorithms. As testing of AI video-interview screening tools offered by a Munich startup revealed, a job candidate’s score would rise when she added a bookshelf to her background and fall when the lighting dimmed. A Guardian investigation similarly found resume-screening tools quietly treating a first name like “Thomas” or a keyword like “church” as a predictor of success on the job.

The Sorting Machine:

What did SFFA reveal about “merit” in college admissions?

A domestic student at a given academic percentile has a far smaller chance of landing a seat at an elite university, and of paying for it, than an identical student fifty years ago.Admissions are fundamentally zero-sum, so where did these seats go?

Lin Huang:

Most people only know Jaime Escalante from Stand and Deliver. Few know there was a Chinese immigrant teacher who did something just as extraordinary:

For 20 years in the Arizona desert, he took the state’s poorest Indigenous, Latino, and Black middle schoolers —many with broken English and shattered foundations —and turned them into statewide champions. His name is Michael Xu. The “Sage from the East.” A man who survived China’s Cultural Revolution, hard labor in the jungle, lifelong dyslexia, and insomnia…. yet became a legendary math teacher. This thread is the first time his full story is being told. And it reveals something much bigger than one teacher’s success.

Aurelia Sutiono:

The University of California, Riverside’s Undocumented Student Programs offers up to $9,000 annually through its Butterfly Project Fellowship to “DREAMers, students from mixed-status families, and undocu allies,” while a comparable graduate research grant for U.S. citizen graduate students provides up to $4,000 per year.

According to fellowship materials reviewed by Campus Reform, the Butterfly Project Fellowship provides up to $9,000 annually to illegal alien graduate students, with awards “disbursed through the Financial Aid Office.” 

At public universities such as UCR, the financial aid office administers taxpayer-supported financial aid programs, meaning public resources are being used to subsidize a university that is providing substantially larger awards to illegal immigrant graduate students than to comparable U.S. citizen graduate students.

Josh Ulick
and Dave Cole:

In 1976, when America’s last big birthday rolled around, the country wasn’t in an obvious mood to celebrate. The Vietnam War and Watergate were fresh in people’s memories. Cities like New York were caught in urban doom loops, and stagflation weighed down the economy.

The bicentennial celebrations offered a break from this national malaise.

For children of the 1970s, it was mostly a chance to celebrate. Kids decorated their bikes with stars and stripes, marched in local parades and painted local fire hydrants red, white and blue–faded examples of which could be seen well into the ’80s. The bicentennial quarter, minted for the occasion, still occasionally turns up in pocket change.

Looking back at photos from the era, with their feathered hair and cutoff jeans, is more than an exercise in nostalgia. If the spirit of 1976 reminds us of anything, it’s that even in uncertain times, the country can throw a good party.

Peachy Keenan:

If the illiterate Dark Ages are indeed coming, at least we will have our stacks of hardcovers to comfort us.

A recent essay in The Atlantic tells us what most of us have already surmised: reading is dead, and it’s not coming back. In “The Age of Reading Is Over,” we learn that not only are fewer people reading long-form prose for pleasure, but soon they will permanently lose the ability to do so. The scroll, the digital cave, has trapped young brains and is atrophying their attention spans early so that they will not be able to get through a novel later on.

“Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to ‘translate’ the book into easier language.)”

Mass literacy is devolving into mass illiteracy, fast. This catastrophe is being helped along by an “elite” culture that has dismissed classic Western literature—the “canon,” as we used to call it—as hopelessly out of date, the work of dead white patriarchs, no longer “relevant” to “today’s modern audiences.”

But how would today’s modern book readers know, since they can’t and won’t ever encounter any of these works in print? It’s one thing to find Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn or Gatsby irrelevant. It’s quite another if you can’t comprehend prose unless it is delivered via a toddler board book or an erotic romantasy novel.

Meanwhile, woke activists in California are trying to get “Black English” (formerly known as Ebonics) taught in preschools to improve literacy skills. They also want to classify it as a separate language so black kids can be deemed “bilingual.” Teaching them how to “speak Black” is “part of a movement to challenge harmful language hierarchies and affirm Black English as a legitimate, rule-governed language rooted in Black history, culture, and community.” I would think children raised in black households would already know how to “speak Black.” “We talk about multilinguals, but we don’t include Black children who may be African-American English speakers,” the director of the Children’s Equity Project, Xigrid Soto-Boykin, said. I am old enough to remember when this was a hilarious scene in the classic 1980s comedy Airplane, when passenger Barbara Billingsley offered to translate for two men who could not understand English. “Excuse me, stewardess, I speak Jive.”

It remains to be determined if the Black English activists will allow white children to learn and speak Black English along with their classmates. Or are some languages only reserved for certain races?

But if Harvard students and preschoolers and everyone in between are not reading anymore, what’s left?

——-

“application bloat”

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Nell Gluckman:

In February, several University of Wisconsin regents were so frustrated with the system’s president during a presentation on artificial intelligence that they started texting one another.

“Pulling teeth to get him to get proactive with strategy and now this is what we get,” one texted to another. The exchange, which surfaced in public records obtained this month by The Chronicle, was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Soon after, President Jay Rothman would be out of a job. At first, it was not clear why. But text messages and emails between the regents and Rothman show the extent that disagreement over what to do about AI played a role in his abrupt firing. The conflict speaks to the increasing uncertainty the technology is bringing to all levels of higher education.

“Jay telling us to question [AI’s] output and then asking AI to rank the UWs and then presenting it to us is comical,” Noah Fritz, a regent, who is a student, wrote to Jack Salzwedel, another regent, during the February board meeting. “I just leaned over and said that to Angela,” Salzwedel responded, referring to another board member. (Salzwedel resigned earlier this month due to family medical challenges.)

Ashok Rai, also a regent, listed a series of unanswered questions in a separate text to Fritz, including, “annual system spend on AI” and “what type of protections do we have, and what type of policies do we need, to make sure we are [not] feeding current platforms with proprietary information.”

“There is no regents guidelines or guardrails on AI,” Timothy Nixon, a regent, told lawmakers. “President Rothman has blocked those.”

“I was of the belief that a systemwide policy would not be helpful since each university was on top of the evolving situation,” Rothman wrote to the lawmakers. Still, in response to the regents’ feedback, he said he prepared a resolution on AI that he planned to bring to the March board meeting, but Bogost told his office not to. Instead, he wrote in the letter, “We were directed to submit guidelines for discussion at that meeting, which we did.”

Records obtained by The Chronicle show that Rothman sent a landscape analysis of AI, in the form of a set of slides to board members ahead of the February board meeting. At least part of the analysis, he said in an email to them, was generated by AI. The slides show ways other systems around the country are using AI to do their day-to-day work. Video recording of the February board meeting show that representatives from around the system gave presentations on how they were teaching about AI, using it in research, or in other ways.

——-

I’ve raised the question of our long-term disastrous literacy issues with various academics.

The response has mostly been head in the sand, with one prominent AI professor stating that “I’m not going to answer that question because as I want to keep this discussion positive”

———-

“application bloat”

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Kristian Niemietz:

Four years ago, a colleague asked me whether I could chair a debate with some guy called ‘Gary Stevenson’, who was, apparently, an anti-inequality campaigner and a YouTube commentator of some description. I had never heard of Stevenson, but accepted. The debate went all right, even though it was mostly a case of talking past each other (which, given that I was the moderator, was probably my fault). It was otherwise not especially memorable. Britain does not exactly have a shortage of left-wing media figures and activists. In the first half of the 2010s, there was the campaign for a ‘Robin Hood Tax’, the anti-tax-avoidance campaign ‘UK Uncut’, the ‘People’s Assembly’ with its endless anti-austerity marches, the Occupy movement, and, later, the political cult around Russell Brand. From 2015, all of these movements coalesced around Corbynism, and while Jeremy Corbyn himself stepped down as Labour leader in 2020, the movement lingered.

Stevenson was slightly different because of his unusual backstory as a former City trader, and because of his singular focus on wealth inequality as opposed to, for example, income inequality, nationalisation, or price controls. Nonetheless, I saw him as just another minor character in Britain’s vast left-wing ecosystem.

Today, four years on, Gary Stevenson is everywhere. He is a best-selling author, his YouTube channel ‘Gary’s Economics’ has more than 1.6 million subscribers, he is all over the media, and Channel 4 have just released an entire documentary about him. Four years ago, the wealth tax, Stevenson’s flagship policy, was a niche idea that only a bunch of tax nerds were interested in. Today, it is the policy idea of the hour, with three-quarters of the public expressing support for it. Stevenson even sells T-shirts with pro-wealth-tax slogans.

John Morley

This paper explores a ubiquitous problem in organization that I call “generational conflict.” Generational conflict is a difference of interest between the people of the present and the people of the future. I focus primarily on conflict among the equity holders of business firms, but I show that the problem also appears in trusts, nonprofits, families, cities, states, and nations. Generational conflict takes many forms. Among other things, it discourages investment in the future, sows disagreement over the pricing of entry and exit, complicates transitions between cooperative and investor ownership, and drives spiraling cycles of withdrawal. Many investor-owned corporations solve these problems by issuing “permanent” equity interests that last as long as the firms that issue them. But other firms, such as law firms, customer coops , and investment funds, issue shorter “impermanent” equity interests that force these firms to find other solutions. Firms with impermanent equity mitigate generational conflict by reducing the mismatches in duration between generations of equity holders and the decisions they make and by disciplining firm governance to reduce the odds of opportunistic behavior across generations. I survey the range of generational conflicts and solutions and offer a theory to explain the balance between them. I argue that the solutions to generational conflict represent some of the most transformative social technologies of modernity. Without them, it would be difficult to imagine skyscrapers, vaccines, airplanes, computers, or much of the other technological and physical capital that characterizes the modern world.

Alex Tabarrok:

Within the United States, professions are regulated in some states but not others—Louisiana, for instance, requires florists to be licensed. (Do license-holding Louisiana florists produce better, safer arrangements? I don’t think so.) Given this variation even within a single country, we’d expect considerable variation across countries too. Multiple independent surveys—not just HK—confirm that Denmark, Sweden, and even France have less occupational licensing than the United States. Since these countries have high state capacity, we can rule out the hypothesis that licensing exists for safety or quality. The implication is clear: occupational licensing is often about rent-seeking, not quality assurance.

Kevin Kelly:

Just to be clear, no human action is doing the mapping. The system itself, the LLM, is mapping each bit of the world, all things, all attributes, all art, all words, all ideas. And astoundingly it creates this map, this latent space, not piecemeal, but all at once simultaneously. (To do so requires an immense, energy-hungry, massive cluster of chips, all connected together with miles of wires — the famous data center now in short supply.)

While training, the LLM is fed millions of books, billions of web pages, and billions of pages of text from social media. It reads every word on each of them, and once this entire library of material is loaded into its mind, it massively calculates all the interconnecting vectors, all the relative directions pointing to each other. The scale of this vast synchronized parallel calculation is staggering. It then throws away the books, the text, the images, and only keeps this tangled web of directions and vectors. These billions of directions are called its parameters. As we build larger and larger models, mapping more and more material, the parameters increase. The latest models on the frontier of AI contain trillions of parameters, meaning there are trillions of directions, or trillions of attributes that it uses to map every idea or thing it has seen.