School Information System – Curated Education Information

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

by Patrick J. Wolf, John Kristof, Alex Wolf, et al.

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: diminishing returns

Will Flanders:

Most school districts are well past the point of diminishing returns–where an additional dollar of spending no longer yields much of any academic benefit. This is made clear in data like that from Ohio here.

Students with Disabilities Are Overrepresented in Private School Choice Programs.

Key Points

Critics predicted that, once private school choice was implemented on a large scale, students with disabilities would become highly concentrated in the public school system. That hasn’t happened.
We conservatively estimate that 258,844 students with disabilities are participating in private school choice programs.
Students with disabilities are being served in the private school choice sector at a rate higher than that in the public school sector.
Private school choice programs provide important educational options for many students with disabilities, helping ensure they can access the education that best meets their needs.

Introduction

On June 27, 2002, the US Supreme Court released its decision in the seminal case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, upholding the constitutionality of Cleveland’s private school voucher program. Ralph Neas, then-president of People for the American Way, was not happy. He strode to the microphone at the lectern on the Court steps and stated confidently, “Private schools do not accept students with disabilities.” The crowd of school choice opponents cheered.¹

Neas didn’t say, “Private schools are not required to accept all students with disabilities.” That statement would have been true. Instead, Neas implied that no private school, anywhere, had ever enrolled a student with a disability. That claim was false.

But a question remains: Are children less likely to be supported by a school voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or education savings account (ESA) if they have a disability? The answer is no.

Students with disabilities are represented among the 1.5 million students in voucher, tax-credit scholarship, or ESA programs at a rate above their presence in the public school population (Figure 1). Using a combination of hard data and research-guided assumptions, we conservatively estimate that 15.5–17.2 percent of the students in private school choice programs have a disability. That plausible range rests above the 15.0 percent national rate of students with disabilities in public schools.² Private school choice programs thus provide an attractive option for over a quarter of a million students with disabilities.

Illinois Higher Education $pending

Illinois Policy

Illinois spends more of its residents’ tax dollars on higher education than any other state in the U.S. but its public universities charge some of the highest tuition anyway.

What the data shows:

Illinois is No. 1 in the nation for per-student spending at four-year public universities ($28,085).

That is more than double the national average and almost four times what Indiana taxpayers spend.

Every single public university in Illinois charges more in tuition than every public university in Indiana.

While Indiana froze its in-state tuition two years ago, Illinois public universities raised tuition at almost every school in 2026.

Illinois taxpayers pay high state taxes to fund the state’s higher education institutions, but families end getting double-charged by also paying exorbitantly high tuition costs to access them. (To say nothing of the state’s property tax burden).

More:

Parkinson’s Law – Why the State Bureaucracy Grows When the Work Shrinks

Kristof:

In 1955, a British naval historian wrote a joke for The Economist. Seventy years later, it remains one of the most accurate descriptions of the modern state ever written. Everyone knows the slogan: work expands to fill the time available. Almost no one knows the mechanism underneath it. That mechanism explains Europe.

The evidence. Between 1914 and 1928, the Royal Navy lost two thirds of its largest warships. Over the same years the Admiralty – the office that ran the ships – grew by three quarters. There were fewer ships and more men behind desks. Then there was the Colonial Office, which kept growing while the colonies left one by one. It was hiring while the empire was shrinking.
The first mechanism. An official who feels overworked has three choices. He can resign, he can share the work with a colleague, or he can ask for two subordinates. He never chooses the colleague, because a colleague is a rival. Two subordinates are a rank. So one tired man becomes three. Then each of the two subordinates feels tired.
The second mechanism. Seven people now do what one did, and they keep each other busy with drafts, approvals, and comments on the approvals. Everyone works hard, and nothing is produced. You have been in this meeting. You have been copied on this email. You have watched three people sign the form that one person filled in.
The law of triviality. Parkinson noticed that a committee will approve a nuclear reactor in minutes, because nobody understands it. The same committee will debate the bicycle shed for an hour, because everybody does. Bureaucracy does not avoid the important question by accident. It avoids it by design – the small question carries no risk, and on the big one, someone’s name goes on the decision.

Notes on Families & k-12 family deserts

Quinton Klabon:

3 parts of Milwaukee have the lowest marriage rates in America. The center of Madison joins them.

(South and West Waukesha is 90th-highest.)

A Wisconsin where all find spouses, marry, have children, and prioritize their families is a happier one.

——-

Interestingly, Madison’s taxpayer funded k-12 system is planning additional new schools amidst declining enrollment.

How fast is AI’s research taste improving?

P-Zero Research:

We find that the experimental research taste of frontier models has doubled every ~3 months since December 2025. The best model, Opus 5.5, now exceeds our expert human baseline. Our human experts are experienced researchers, but most haven’t worked at a frontier lab. Why measure research taste? In the AI Futures Model, it largely determines how quickly artificial superintelligence is reached once coding is fully automated.

Notes on “ai”

Seb Krier:

1. It’s very telling that the default question in tech and journalism is “how worried are you about X” and fighting over what to worry about. There’s a deeply anxious cultural backdrop in Western Europe and North America that deeply affects how any technological development is interpreted; see for example news.gallup.com/poll/714593/op…. “Nervousness as seriousness” does seem to be a larger problem in tech/broader discourse at the moment. I think you can care about risks/externalities while remaining pretty optimistic about technology.

2. I’m tired of people who in private pretend to be uncertain or only care about tail risk but then go on media campaigns making all sorts of absolute claims. I think trying to stoke flames and get everyone to freak out is deeply unhelpful, and will come with costs. I also continue to think p(dooms) are bad, vibe-based measures: see x.com/sebkrier/statu…. People who should know better ignore that because they do the standard shortcut of acknowledging the caveat as sufficient for handling it. And this is coming from someone who does think working on catastrophic risks is important!

Silicon Valley thinks AI will kill jobs. Economists are not convinced:

Delphine Strauss:

The most worrying development is a cross-country slowdown in entry-level hiring in tech-related occupations — consistent with AI turbocharging the productivity of senior staff while taking over routine tasks done by juniors.

But there is no consensus on the cause. “Unemployment of young graduates has worsened since 2015. It’s a long-term trend. AI is clearly not the only factor,” Broecke argued, citing a potential oversupply of graduates, the rise of remote work and high interest rates.

The absence of aggregate job losses may simply be the calm before the storm. “Talk to executives in the non-tech sector — those who use AI as customers — and many say they don’t need as many workers as they did before AI,” Johnson said. “It is not yet in the numbers . . . but the automation threat is very real.”

Modelling by the Anthropic Institute, published last month, included an extreme scenario where rapid gains in AI’s capabilities cut “cognitive” employment by a fifth by 2030, leaving one in five white-collar workers and one in 10 of all workers unemployed.

The model is highly sensitive to underlying assumptions. The extreme scenario assumes AI will rapidly become able to perform most tasks without human oversight, will be widely adopted and will generate big productivity gains.

US colleges slash tuition by tens of thousands as families balk at sky-high sticker prices

Ariel Zilber

As a record-low number of Americans believe attending college is crucial for success, colleges across the country are slashing tuition by tens of thousands of dollars — though the eye-popping cuts often won’t translate into equally large savings for families.

The Post identified at least a dozen colleges and universities that have cut or announced cuts to tuition or required program fees this year, with several private schools chopping published undergraduate prices by roughly 40% to more than 50%.

Emory & Henry University in Virginia cut tuition roughly in half to $19,990 this fall, while Arizona’s Prescott College lowered on-campus undergraduate tuition 55.8%, from $33,960 to $15,000.

AHM Statement on OpenAI’s October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents

AHM:

Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI – which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution – released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.

Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy, opened their initial advisory statement by saying that frontier AI corporations should not test advanced mathematical problems on internal models. In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Group’s position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research — norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest.

Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAI’s assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism.

“Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has taken steps to make that downward trajectory harder for the public to see”

Will Flanders and Kyle Koenen:

Wisconsin’s student performance has declined, and it has the largest Black-White achievement gap in the nation.
The state superintendent’s address attributed challenges to funding, while critics argue spending is high but not effective.
Proposed reforms include realigning state tests with national standards and adopting A-F grades for schools.
Other suggestions involve a “Teacher Bill of Rights” to address classroom discipline and expanding school choice options.
Wisconsin’s student performance has declined, and it has the largest Black-White achievement gap in the nation.
The state superintendent’s address attributed challenges to funding, while critics argue spending is high but not effective.
Proposed reforms include realigning state tests with national standards and adopting A-F grades for schools.
Other suggestions involve a “Teacher Bill of Rights” to address classroom discipline and expanding school choice options.

Wisconsin schools sit at a crossroads. After a decade of significant education reforms, Wisconsin has lost ground on key measures of student performance. Wisconsin is now one of the worst states in post-pandemic academic recovery and continues to have the largest Black-White achievement gap of any state.

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has taken steps to make that downward trajectory harder for the public to see, including lowering Forward Exam cut scores, producing an overnight jump in “proficiency” that no longer aligns with national NAEP benchmarks. Despite near-record spending of $18,746 per student on average, Forward Exam scores released last week remain largely stagnant.

State Superintendent Jill Underly’s annual State of Education address ignored much of this reality. Underly framed Wisconsin’s education challenges as simply a result of inadequate funding, rather than examining whether schools are effectively using the substantial resources they already receive. She offered little in terms of concrete reforms to improve academic achievement, classroom discipline, or school effectiveness, instead falling back on platitudes about the importance of public education.

———

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Nadia Scharf, Hope Karnopp:

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

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A College-by-College Guide to Which Majors Pay Off — or Don’t

Arfa Momin, Ron Lieber:

Arfa Momin finished her bachelor’s degree in May. Ron Lieber is one-third finished with paying for his children’s degrees.

History majors can out-earn English majors by more than $50,000 four years after graduation.

A Juilliard graduate — trained at one of the country’s most prestigious music schools — may not earn more than the median high school graduate.

And the place to get the single most lucrative degree in America wasn’t in the Ivy League, and it wasn’t in a computer science program. It was in the mathematics department at Duke, where the median income among graduates was $297,029.

Here’s how earnings for a handful of majors vary across most schools

Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90

Janine Liberty:

Margaret Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died on Sep. 30. She was 90.

A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO.

Her life’s work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: “Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon.”

“To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer — to say she was ahead of her time — would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved,” says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Analysis: Forward Exam Results Show Wisconsin Schools Still Stuck in Neutral

Will Flanders:

When it comes to the status of public education in Wisconsin, it’s Groundhog Day again. The new Forward Exam numbers for 2025-26 are out, and they tell a far too familiar story. After three years under the Department of Public Instruction (DPI)’s revised cut scores, Wisconsin is still mostly stuck in neutral. English/Language Arts proficiency […]

When it comes to the status of public education in Wisconsin, it’s Groundhog Day again. The new Forward Exam numbers for 2025-26 are out, and they tell a far too familiar story. After three years under the Department of Public Instruction (DPI)’s revised cut scores, Wisconsin is still mostly stuck in neutral. English/Language Arts proficiency now sits at about 53 percent statewide. That is up from 51.1 percent in 2023-24. An increase is better than a decline, but the movement is marginal.

“I was the teacher and the mom who had been trained in the very practices that would later fail my own child”

Missy Purcell:

Lucy Calkins was a huge part of my preservice teacher training at the University of Georgia. I still have my copy of The Art of Teaching Writing. Later, my district introduced me to Fountas and Pinnell’s Guided Reading. Balanced literacy wasn’t something sitting on the fringes of my professional life. It was thoroughly embedded in how I had been taught to think about literacy.

I believed it, and I taught it with fidelity, and then I had a child with dyslexia.

Anyone who has been through that knows that it changes the way you look at everything.

I watched a system that was supposed to teach my child to read cling to practices that didn’t teach him to read. I was actually told that the balanced literacy approaches being used in his school were appropriate for children with dyslexia. I have emails from that time explaining that they weren’t going to focus on sounding words out.

I still get emotional thinking about that.

Now I know what my child needed. I know what the research says. And I know how deeply entrenched this methodology has become in our schools.

So standing in the same physical space as Lucy Calkins at a conference devoted to advancing the science of reading was complicated for me.

For clarity, I don’t have a problem with Lucy Calkins learning.

Everyone should be learning.

If someone discovers that what they believed, taught, promoted, or sold does not align with the evidence, I absolutely want them sitting in the room learning something different.

But learning creates a responsibility to act on your new knowledge.

Lucy and I had a short conversation at the conference. She talked about teachers learning all this information and then having to go back to their districts and figure out how to actually implement it.

And I kept thinking: Teachers have been trying.

Most universities, he says, build their budgets off last year’s budget and hope for the best.

Tom Bergeron:

“They don’t take into account revenue, and then at the end of the year, they’re like, ‘Oh, boy, how are we going to do this?’” Tate says. “That’s how you get two, three, $400 million in structural deficit, and you’re never really out of it.”

And waiting on the state to bail you out isn’t a plan.

“I don’t think the cavalry’s coming through the door,” he says.

So, Rutgers is going revenue-first. Tate’s finance team now forecasts revenue month by month. The University Senate is represented on the revenue forecasting committee, and the budget gets built off what’s actually coming in.

Tuition is one of the biggest levers. Tate says Rutgers is taking a more data-informed approach to enrollment management, emphasizing stronger student recruitment, retention, and long-term academic success.

“The most expensive education for both parties, the university and the students, is when they don’t finish,” Tate says. “Increasing the retention rate is actually a fiscally sound policy for the family and for the university.”

Schools that don’t figure that out, he says, won’t make it.

“Universities that don’t attend to that enrollment management strategy are going to go under,” he says. “It’s just bad business.”

k-12 tax & $pending climate: Tax base edition

Alex Tabarrok:

Texas produces more than Canada with three quarters of the population. Rough numbers for 2025:

k-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Proposition I: Audit Austin

Lawrence Person:

Another election year means another batch of propositions for Austin citizens to vote on. Most are the usual mix of bonds and bad ideas, but Save Austin Now has managed to get Proposition I, a proposal to perform regular audits of the city budget, on the ballot.

One year after defeating a massive tax hike proposal, Austin voters will decide this November whether to lock in regular audits of city finances through a charter initiative that is facing opposition from a government employees’ union.

Proposition I resulted from a citizen petition organized by the Save Austin Now PAC, a group that successfully worked to defeat a proposed 20 percent tax rate hike in 2025. This year, the PAC’s petition effort collected more than 20,000 signatures to place the proposed “Independent Affordability & Efficiency Initiative” (IAEI) on the ballot to mandate hiring an independent and experienced audit firm through a competitive bid process.

Under the measure, the selected auditing agency would analyze the spending, performance, and outcomes of all city departments and contractors to identify opportunities to streamline and optimize staffing and management structure and identify fraud, waste, abuse, and conflicts of interest.

The IAEI analysis would also include an examination of how city policy, such as tax rates, affects resident affordability.

Attorney and former Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire, who drafted the charter amendment, told The Texan that voters sent a message to the city council last year in rejecting the property tax increase, but that Proposition I “would make the message permanent.”

“That message is ‘enough,’ and that their taxes are too high,” he said.

Aleshire noted that the ballot initiative differs from an ordinance approved by the city council in February 2026.

“The ordinance can be repealed the day after the election by the Austin City Council,” he said. “But the charter amendment is basically the people telling the city council that they must have this new audit process, and therefore it’s also enforceable by the voters, and it cannot be changed without another vote of the public.”

What’s the future for pure math research in the age of AI?

Stephen Wolfram:

We’ll talk later about the general character and value of pure mathematics. But before that, let’s address the issue of the moment: the role of modern AI.

And the first thing to say is that it’s unquestionably useful, sometimes very useful. For me, its greatest use in mathematical pursuits has been its ability in effect to thematically mine the knowledgebase of human mathematics. Starting back in the 1970s, being able to do keyword searches of the scientific literature was a crucial enabler of quite a bit of the research that I did. And now, with modern AI, one can do so much more. Because somewhere inside those LLMs—in a way that we don’t yet scientifically understand—there’s what amounts to a representation of raw ideas gleaned from all those millions of papers and books about mathematics.

And, at its best, it’s not just about retrieving things. It’s also about making connections. Of being able to see that this result here can be put together with that result there to come up with a surprising and useful conclusion. Humans routinely do that too. But they tend to have only read hundreds of papers; AIs have effectively read millions, and it’s cheap for them in effect to try out lots and lots of possible combinations.

So you think you could be an electrician?

Jesse Smith:

When I was 20, I broke both my heels in a construction accident. The right one was surgically reassembled using four heel fragments and extra bone from my hip. Workplace accidents seem to have worse outcomes than similar accidents occurring elsewhere, and at the time this specific injury had a generally poor prognosis, so doctors were initially uncertain whether I’d be permanently disabled.

When I think about my teenage son or daughter working in construction, my mind often goes to The Accident. I picture my daughter, who’s three years younger than I was at the time, wheeling to The Beer Store in a Workers’ Comp rental wheelchair each day, and coming home to down 12-pack of Molson Canadian. Or I think of my son sleeping with a fan every night to overpower the ringing in his ears. Over enough time, physical jobs exact a physical toll that desk jobs largely avoid.

Most white-collar professions have a trivially small risk of death. Even in gray-collar jobs that are widely perceived as dangerous, such as policing, most workplace deaths are caused by motor vehicles. But some trades jobs carry a risk of death or serious injury connected to specific and inherent job demands. That is, something that seems dangerous that you often do is the most likely to harm or kill you.

What is going on in education in England?

Daisy Christodoulou:

Over the last few weeks, there have been two big education news stories in England: the OECD’s PISA results, and the government’s announcement of qualification reform. Half the subscribers to this Substack are from outside England, and I thought everyone might be interested in an update on what is going on here and how we are perceived in the rest of the world. This post will focus on the PISA results, and a future one will look at new government policy.

And there are legitimate critiques to make of PISA’s approach – critiques that I have made in the past, and am happy to repeat now. The irony of the “can we trust PISA” debate is that PISA is generally regarded as being a progressive alternative to more traditional national exams. It focusses on problem-solving skills and selects content with relevance to real-life situations, meaning that its questions don’t test concepts like photosynthesis and algebra in the same way you would get at GCSE. Its Director, Andreas Schleicher, repeatedly takes the progressive side in education debates, including in a set-piece debate with me in 2017. In 2015, most countries switched from taking the test on paper to taking it on screen. Every now and again, PISA comes up with some kind of new and groovy assessment formatthat they hope will reward new and groovy skills – and every time, it turns out that the countries who do best at it tend to be the ones doing best on the maths tests.

In short, PISA is a screen-based test of problem-solving skills that requires limited specific curriculum knowledge. If you wanted to design a test that would be least likely to reward England’s educational approach, and most likely to reward the approach in Scotland & Wales, it would be PISA.

And yet, England are still doing better on it.

The main alternative to PISA is a set of tests run by an international research association based in Amsterdam. They run tests of Year 5 and Year 9 science and maths, called TIMSS, and tests of Year 5 reading, called PIRLS. These tests do have more specific curriculum content in them. In the most recent round of each, England was also the only country outside of East Asia to come in the top 10 in all of TIMSS and PIRLS. It was also, again, one of the few countries to buck the trend of falling scores. So on both sets of international tests, which are run by totally different international organisations and which are trying to do different things, England is performing well, and resisting the trend of international declines.

OK, so it works in practice. But does it work in theory?

Back in 2013, I wrote an article talking about the different types of evidence we can collect to see if a particular approach works or not. One important source of evidence involves statistics on student achievement and test scores – evidence like the data from PISA and TIMSS.

UW-Madison professor Francis Halzen wins Nobel Prize in physics

A University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of physics was awarded the Nobel Prize of Physics in Stockholm, Sweden on Oct. 6.

Francis Halzen, a professor born in Belgium with a long resume of prestigious awards, received the award for his contributions to the understanding of neutrinos, astrophysical particles produced by energetic events in the universe, according to a UW-Madison news release.

Halzen leads work at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, an Antarctic telescope embedded a kilometer into ice. The IceCube telescope was the first to provide evidence of a source of high-energy cosmic rays, the release states, which scientists have struggled to pinpoint since their discovery over 100 years ago.

The IceCube observatory was upgraded earlier this year, allowing for more precise measurements of neutrino properties, according to a February news release from the university. Scientific institutions around the world supported the upgrade, with light sensors from Germany and Japan and surface cables from Sweden. The upgrade also installed two seismometers – the deepest in the world – to help scientists monitor earthquakes with never-before-seen clarity and collected deep ice water samples.

On a Zoom call with colleagues, students and local and international reporters Oct. 6, Halzen expressed gratitude to UW-Madison and the U.S. National Science Foundation for supporting and investing in the project, which began in the 1980s.

‘No-Cost’ Aspen Program Requires 24 School Districts to Hand Over Student Data by Race

Stephanie Lindquist-Arora:

Earlier this year, the Aspen Institute’s Education & Society Program and the College Boardannounced a multiyear program, running from September 2026 through 2029, to increase the share of low-income and “missing middle” students who take Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or dual-enrollment courses.

The pitch is simple: it’s free. Applications were due June 15, and the application says, “District leaders commit to a no-cost, three-year engagement that includes participation in biannual convenings, virtual learning sessions, and Learning Lab site visits.”

According to emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the first convening was held in Aspen, Colorado, from Sept. 20-23, and the hosting organizations paid for participants’ flights, hotels, and meals. A second convening is being planned for spring 2027.

But free travel is only part of what districts receive, and “no-cost” describes the fee, not the obligations.

According to information provided to interested applicants, districts must, before acceptance, sign a data-sharing agreement to “provide current disaggregated data on advanced coursework participation.” That means the number and percentage of students enrolled in Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and dual-enrollment courses, “disaggregated by race, ethnicity, income status, and other locally relevant student groups.”

District leaders are also required to provide course participation, pass rates, and outcomes for student groups enrolled in advanced coursework. The agreement also asks for information on “college enrollment … and other indicators that help districts identify whether advanced coursework participation is translating into stronger postsecondary outcomes.”

In other words, participating districts have agreed to hand over enrollment and outcome data broken out by student demographics, for the purpose of boosting Advanced Placement participation and socially engineering advanced coursework. And the request for racial data raises a question. The program’s public materials name low-income and “missing middle” students as the target. Why, then, does it ask for race?

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more.

What’s notable, however, is how little commenters had to say that was really new

Daniel Willingham:

They mostly repeated what they always say about choice, charters, integration, poverty, or whatever. That’s why I was irked.

They didn’t have anything new to say because a story is not new evidence which calls for new arguments. A story is a fresh point of discussion. The examples change, but the logic doesn’t.

The main players of the last three weeks have each acted rationally, but in the end, there has been a lot of intellectual energy expended and words produced, but a helpful outcome has not resulted. Helpful would be “some improvement in our understanding that survives the occasion.” Someone’s mind would have to be changed, or at least, their predictions sharpened, their confidence qualified, or a disagreement clarified.

Too often, viral articles create a compelling reason to speak, without creating a comparably strong reason to rethink.

So here’s a friendly challenge to the commentariat. When the next viral article comes along, see if you can identify one thing in the story that improves your argument: a familiar term you now see you need to clarify, a puzzle you’ve resolved, or a new aspect of the problem you’ve identified.

A long slog is expected, but let’s makes sure we’re not stationary.

———-

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Hodson and his colleagues wanted to find a way for Berea’s low-income students to graduate entirely debt-free.

Eric Kelderman:

The unique work-based college in Kentucky was already covering tuition for its students, who all come from low-income families. Students are employed for at least 10 hours a week on campus.

For most students, there was still an annual gap of about $1,000. That was the amount not covered by federal and state financial aid and money from the college.

In August, Berea announced it would cover the full cost of attendance starting in the fall of 2027. That meant tuition, fees, room and board, and even supplies and books.

⚙️ The process: A donor stepped forward to help cover the initial cost of the plan for a year.

Relatively, that cost wasn’t a lot. With a typical enrollment of 1,500 students, the college would need an extra $1.5 million. Berea has a roughly $130-million budget; most expenses are covered by interest from its $1.8-billion endowment as well as other annual fund raising.

Still, the college had to make “totally free college” both understandable and sustainable.

Berea had to revise financial-aid letters. Officials had to make sure the messaging was clear to parents. “[We’re] making sure they do understand, like, there is no catch when you see zero as your bottom line — that that’s a true transparent number that you can trust,” Hodson said.

The college also had to make the math work.

A journey to the heart of history’s largest nonterritorial empire

Jeremy Stern

“One of our most important roles that we play now in our lives is to try and keep the grandchildren grounded,” says Ed. “They have an impossible time raising kids. They’ve done an incredible job, and the kids are just great. But they’re still very protected, which you have to understand. We took the older one a couple years ago to the mall for her birthday to buy a pair of earrings. That was a really eye-opening experience, just walking through the mall.”

“We haven’t really discussed it with them yet, about how they’re going to integrate them. One day they’ll be out for high school, maybe. I don’t know.”

“It’s complicated,” says Karen.

“It’s very, very complicated,” Ed agrees. “But he knows what people need and want, sometimes even before they know it. I mean, people call him arrogant—”

“He’s not,” says Karen.

“—but time after time, his arrogance just turns into truth.”

“You will experience it one day too,” Ed ruminates, “when your children eclipse you.”

Karen nods and waits for her husband to finish, then comes alive. She shifts her posture back toward me with a tender but firm gaze. “I can tell you how it is for me as a mother,” she says. “This is my child.”

“The Eye of Sauron” is how her child’s longtime lieutenants have referred to the unblinking, sometimes unnerving silences he involuntarily imposes when preparing to answer a question or make a point. I see it now, I think.

A Company press handler knocks and enters; Ed and Karen have to be going, it’s time. As we stand up to say goodbye, I mention that I’ll soon be interviewing their son at his home, then joining him and his family for dinner that Friday, and get in a parting question about it.

Former Evanston D65 Superintendent Devon Horton changes plea to guilty in federal kickback case

Claire Murphy:

A little more than two weeks before former Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Superintendent Devon Horton’s federal trial was set to begin over a kickback scheme he is accused of leading during his time at District 65, Horton changed his original plea of not guilty during a court appearance Monday.

Horton, who was indicted last year on 17 counts of embezzlement, wire fraud and tax evasion over his involvement in what prosecutors describe as an effort to misappropriate District 65 funds and award himself over $81,000 in kickbacks from approving the work contracts of three of his friends’ companies, pleaded guilty to three of those counts in federal court in Chicago Oct. 5.

Judge Thomas M. Durkin accepted Horton’s guilty plea to those three counts. The first concerned wire fraud, where Horton used telecommunications to intentionally defraud District 65 out of money, the second involved converting the district’s property to his personal use and the third dealt with failure to report ill-gotten gains on his income tax form.

Judge Durkin ordered a pre-sentence investigation to assist the court in reaching a decision as to Horton’s eventual punishment.

U.S. prosecuting Attorney Emily Vermylen informed the court Monday that Horton’s guilty plea on the three counts would reduce the length of his prison sentence. If the court deemed Horton had clearly demonstrated acceptance of responsibility for his crimes at the time of sentencing, the anticipated prison sentence would range from 87 to 108 months in prison, or about seven to nine years, she said.

“then He Made School Boards”

Jonathan Turley:

“In the first place, God made idiots,” Mark Twain once wrote in an 1879 travel book. “That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

It appears that most Americans now agree with him. New polling shows that K-12 education has now reached a record low in the number of people who are even “somewhat satisfied” with the state of education in the U.S.

What is most troubling is that the near-total contempt for our school system does not make a bit of difference. Families and students have become largely irrelevant to an education cartel, a self-sustaining, self-perpetuating political alliance of unions and politicians.

According to Gallup, only 32 percent of American adults say they are “completely” or “somewhat” satisfied with the quality of K-12 education. That is the lowest figure in Gallup’s 27 years of asking the question. Public satisfaction with the school system has dropped almost 20 points since just 2024.

For many of us, neither the drop in public support is surprising. The collapse comes at a time when universities are reporting that college students are entering higher education without basic math and other skills.

We have also seen the dismal decline in standards at elite universities like Harvard, where faculty have been compelled to teach high school-level math classes to students.

In May, faculty in the University of California system (which eliminated standardized testing to achieve greater equity in admissions) reported an alarming lack of math knowledge among new students.

Most recently, a University of California, San Diego, faculty report found a nearly 30-fold increase since 2020 in incoming students whose math skills fell below a high-school level.

For many of us, neither the drop in skills nor public support is surprising. For generations, the public school system has failed students in major cities. Despite massive budget increases, actual test scores continue to fall or remain at subpar levels.

Understanding the AI That Drives Robots

Brian Potter

It’s been over a year since I last looked at the state of humanoid robots, and enthusiasm for the technology shows no sign of waning. Startups NEURA Robotics and Figure AI raised $1.4 billion and $1 billion, respectively, and Apptronik raised $520 million. China’s Unitree went public, raising roughly $900 million, and Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC later this year. A few weeks ago China held the second annual World Humanoid Robot Games, showing humanoid robots performing all manner of impressive physical feats.

Madison’s taxpayer funded K-12 system considers 2 new buildings

Erin Gretzinger:

Regardless of whether new school buildings happen, elementary schools set to be at less than 65% utilization 10 years from now include Stephens, Lapham and Marquette, Jeffrey Erlanger (formerly Lindbergh), Mendota, Lowell and Sandberg. Middle schools set to be at less than 65% utilization in 10 years include Black Hawk, O’Keeffe, Sennett and Sherman.

District officials previously said schools below capacity could become sites for additional programming. Green said the third round of draft maps will focus more on possible programming options.

“We want to hear from families what else they would like to see, and we want to do that by maximizing our school spaces and our school facilities,” Green said. “Might that be STEM programming? Might that be arts? Might that be additional dual-language immersion programming or some other programming, as well?”

The school district will host several more input sessions on the second round of draft scenarios, with the last session taking place next Monday. Recordings of some second-round sessions are available to watch on the district’s website. An interactive map showing the current draft maps and the proposed changes will be available on the district’s website by Oct. 12.

——-

Teagan King:

Currently, Madison’s schools operate at a wide range of their capacities. For example, during the 2025-26 school year, O’Keeffe Middle School operated at 51% of its capacity while Carey Elementary School operated at 143%.

With the new boundary review, Madison wants most of its schools to operate at about 85% of their capacity, but along the edges of the District, the goal is 75% to ensure there’s room for more students to open enroll from neighboring districts and for Madison families who now enroll elsewhere to come back.

From 2005-06 to 2024-25, enrollment in six Madison suburbs grew between 25.9% and 50%, while Madison’s enrollment only grew 2.9%.

Operating at over capacity limits programming because there’s no space: Lake View, Van Hise, Kennedy and Schenk all offer traditional kindergarten but not 4K, which puts them on the high-priority list for freeing up room.

———

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

The End of College as We Know It

Andy Kessler

Universities can take advantage of AI rather than ban it. The sage-on-a-stage format is over. Learning is experiential. As corporate America rejects college branding, graduates would benefit from more hands-on experience. Universities may be uniquely positioned to implement what I call “virtual apprenticeships,” real job experience while still at school.

I suggest all students spend their entire junior year on team projects. Assignments might include building nuclear autonomous buses or robots that cook. Cross-discipline self-organizing teams will form. You’ll need engineers and coders, but also prelaw and political-science majors to clear the regulatory path, philosophers and marketing majors to write press releases, designers, nutritionists, etc.

Self-paced AI-tutored instruction can help students learn what they need as problems arise. A smart entrepreneur might even create a student transfer portal to recruit talented students from other universities.

According to Gallup, in 2013, 70% of Americans said college was very important. Today it’s only 31%. If universities don’t change, more than a few will implode, while others will wither away over decades. AI and alternative forms of learning are already rising. Something radical is needed to stop the decay of our once great universities. Who will step up?

Mom says Wautoma player can’t walk, talk after hit in football game

Samara Kalk Derby:

The mother of a Wautoma High School senior who was seriously injured during a homecoming football game against Waupun on Friday night said Sunday that he is unable to walk or talk.

Dom Rooney, who turns 18 on Tuesday, was taken by Med Flight to Children’s Wisconsin in Milwaukee after being hit in the head during the game. His mother, Kimberly Kozlowski, said doctors diagnosed him with a traumatic brain injury.

A team of specialists who work with functional neurological disorder will assess Dom on Monday and determine next steps, Kozlowski said.

Dom plays on both the offensive and defensive lines and has played all four years of high school, she said.

Incentives in Academic Research

Soos Mate:

Charlie Munger said: “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome”. The issue with Academic Research, in my opinion, is that the outcomes have drifted very far away from the original goal, which I believe to be the advancement of scientific understanding, and training of the new generation of researchers. Academic research was meant to be about breaking new ground, keeping to honesty and good scientific conduct, being clear and upfront about uncertainties, errors, and mistakes, and improving our common understanding of science, all the while training the new generation to follow these goals and principles.

Recently, I have bumped into multiple cases where I believe the correctness of the results, the honesty of the people writing them, or the lack of curiosity once they are told that their results are wrong, incorrect, faulty, or misleading, has been unsatisfying. Simply put, researchers are not too interested in learning that their papers or reports are wrong, and/or misleading others who don’t happen to know that the results are — known to the authors, and a few select others to be partially — incorrect.

The issue is, once you published the paper, and got the promotions and fame, it doesn’t matter that the results are wrong, and known to be wrong or misleading, and potentially doing harm to the advancement of science. It’s not your problem. It’s someone else’s problem. In fact, when I challenged the authors of one such paper, considered state-of-the-art, and known to the authors to have incorrect evaluation, one of the author’s response was along the lines of acknowledging the issues, but refusing to retract the paper, and instead asking if it’s bothering me in publishing my paper.

Civics: Even Democrats Oppose John Roberts Letting Foreign Citizens Tilt The House Of Representatives

Ben Weingarten:

Americans overwhelmingly believe congressional seats should be distributed solely based on the number of U.S. citizens in each state. They also think there should be a citizenship question on the census.

Those are two of the key findings in a new survey, obtained exclusively by The Federalist, indicating significant public support for policies — long opposed by the left — that the Trump administration is pursuing pertaining to the crucial decennial count.

The survey, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates on Sept. 23, shows that of 1,000 likely voters, nearly two-thirds, 65 percent, believe the congressional apportionment base should be comprised solely of U.S. citizens.

Strikingly, not only four in five self-identified Republicans, but also 54 percent of Democrats and nearly 60 percent of independents polled also somewhat or strongly agree with a policy that would necessarily exclude illegal aliens and other noncitizens from the count.

U.S. News Shuffled Its N.Y. High School Rankings. An Uproar Ensued.

Matthew Haag:

The omission stemmed from a dispute with the New York State Education Department, which ordered the operator of the A.P. program, the College Board, not to share the data with U.S. News, citing student privacy concerns. Three other states — Colorado, Maine and Vermont — also withheld their A.P. scores.

The result was a stunning collapse for schools that had long dominated the list, such as Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, the acclaimed specialized school, which plunged to No. 2,561 in the nation from No. 33.

“The United Academic Workers of America”

Wall Street Journal:

While the UAW has struggled to unionize auto plants in the U.S. South, it has had success organizing on college campuses. These include the University of California, California State University, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, the University of Southern California and Penn State.

The UAW claims to represent more than 120,000 workers in higher education, largely graduate students. Incredibly, the UAW has more members at the University of California than it does at General Motors . Last year it organized 24,500 workers at universities. Yet despite those gains, UAW membership overall has shrunk by about 23,000 since 2016.

——-

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on Wisconsin Act 10.

Read the full report and our remedies here: justice.gov/opa/media/1464…

“On October 6, 2021, President Biden placed a personal 15-minute phone call to NSBA President Dr. Viola Garcia to thank her for submitting the letter. One week later, on October 13, 2021, Dr. Garcia was appointed to the federal National Assessment Governing Board”

Via US attorney General Todd Blanche’s Report

….. which details Weaponization of the Department against these parents — from attempting to get the National Security Division involved to ignoring repeated warnings from employees that leadership’s actions could be unconstitutional.

Along with the report, we’ve released hundreds of exhibits and emails that make official and verify what many Americans had guessed: the Garland DOJ worked hand in hand with WH officials and the National School Boards Association to chill free speech and parental rights while they threatened to prosecute parents and label them domestic terrorists.

————

Five Days in October: What the Justice Department’s 2026 Report Reveals About the Federal School-Board Investigation

Introduction to the Materials

On October 5, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice published The 2026 Report to Expose the Weaponization of Government Against Parents in Schools[cite: 1, 3]. Prepared by Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Weaponization Working Group pursuant to Executive Order 14147, the 273-page document investigates the origin, drafting, and execution of former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s October 4, 2021 memorandum[cite: 1, 3, 4]. That 2021 directive mobilized federal law enforcement agencies and created a national task force to address alleged threats against public school administrators and board members[cite: 4, 5, 18].

Drawing from internal emails, congressional disclosures, and the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) after-action review, the report argues that federal power was improperly deployed to intimidate parents exercising their First Amendment rights[cite: 5, 6]. While the document represents an administration-led critique of prior policies, its released emails and official records highlight fast-tracked decision-making, widespread internal DOJ skepticism, and critical lessons regarding government accountability[cite: 5, 8]. Below are the top ten core takeaways every parent, student, and taxpayer should know, followed by ten obscure but salient details buried within the report’s evidence.

Ten Most Important Points for Parents, Students, and Taxpayers

Origins in Private Lobbying: The Garland Memorandum was directly prompted by a September 29, 2021 letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President Biden, which requested federal intervention under the PATRIOT Act and characterized public school board protests as potential “domestic terrorism”[cite: 4, 6, 7].
Pre-Existing White House Collaboration: Internal emails reveal that NSBA interim CEO Chip Slaven collaborated for weeks with White House Senior Advisor Mary Wall prior to sending the letter, providing advance draft summaries so White House officials could brief DOJ leadership before public release[cite: 7, 8, 9].
Widespread Internal DOJ Resistance: Career prosecutors and attorneys across the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, Criminal Division, Civil Rights Division, National Security Division, and FBI strongly questioned the initiative, noting that the reported conduct was almost entirely local and protected by the First Amendment[cite: 8, 10, 11, 13, 15].
Unresolved Warnings and Rushed Execution: The Garland Memorandum was drafted and finalized over a single weekend—just five days after the NSBA letter—without DOJ leadership ever formally addressing or resolving the constitutional and jurisdictional concerns raised by internal staff[cite: 4, 11, 17].
Creation of the FBI “EDUOFFICIALS” Threat Tag: Following the memo, the FBI established a specialized threat tag (“EDUOFFICIALS”) and opened 25 “Guardian” assessments into parents and school board incidents[cite: 19, 20]. Six were assigned to Counterterrorism, seventeen to Criminal Investigations, and two to Weapons of Mass Destruction[cite: 20].
Zero Resulting Federal Prosecutions: Despite deploying federal task forces, FBI threat-tracking, and interagency coordination, the working group found no record of any federal criminal prosecutions resulting from the investigations into parents[cite: 20].
Chilling Effect on Public Speech: Parents and advocates testified at DOJ roundtables that the threat of federal scrutiny and FBI investigation paralyzed civic participation, causing attendance at public school board meetings to drop significantly[cite: 20, 21, 40].
Formal Retraction and Apology by NSBA: On October 22, 2021, following widespread backlash from state associations, the NSBA Board of Directors issued a formal apology to its members, stating there was “no justification for some of the language” in its original letter[cite: 4, 7].
Formal Rescission of the Policy: Pursuant to Executive Order 14147, the Justice Department formally rescinded the Garland Memorandum and dissolved all associated task forces and reporting protocols[cite: 3, 5].
Five-Point DOJ Remedial Plan: The DOJ announced five concrete remedies: offering targeted individuals access to review their FBI Guardian files, attaching cautionary disclaimers to closed records, reviewing files for constitutional violations to issue formal apologies, awarding $1.5 million to train school resource officers on parental rights, and funding teacher training on First Amendment protections[cite: 22].

Ten Obscure but Salient Points

The “Anti-MAGA Task Force” Warning: On October 2, 2021, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kevin Driscoll warned against linking school board threats with election threat initiatives, stating leadership “might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force”[cite: 13]. Public Integrity Chief Corey Amundson replied: “Exactly! Stupid, stupid, stupid”[cite: 13, 15].
“This Is Ridiculous” Internal Assessment: On September 25, 2021, Robyn Thiemann in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General emailed colleagues attempting to find a federal crime in the NSBA’s claims, concluding bluntly: “This is ridiculous”[cite: 10].
Draft Language Proposed Deploying the National Guard: Early internal drafts of the NSBA letter contained explicit requests to deploy the Army National Guard and Military Police to local school district meetings, a clause interim CEO Chip Slaven later cut to avoid public backlash[cite: 111].
FBI Leadership Was Blindsided: FBI Deputy Assistant Director Jay Greenberg confirmed internally that the Bureau was “caught off guard” and did not receive the memorandum “in time to stop it,” noting DOJ pushed the directive “unilaterally”[cite: 16, 17].
First Amendment Boundaries Noted by DOJ Attorneys: Addressing allegations surrounding groups showing up at meetings or performing Nazi salutes, ODAG attorney Myesha Braden noted that individuals can perform such acts “all day long” unless violating another’s constitutional rights, adding that “the constitutional right part is what appears to be missing”[cite: 10].
National Security Division Demanded Removal: An attorney in DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD) requested that NSD be removed from the school board task force, pointing out that DOJ does not “start a narrowly focused task force every time some group believes they are the subject of threats” and that no national security nexus existed[cite: 18].
Disregarded Loudoun County Restroom Assault: The report details how a 15-year-old disabled student was sexually assaulted in a Stone Bridge High School restroom stall on May 28, 2021[cite: 4, 128, 129, 130]. Despite being notified the same day, Superintendent Scott Ziegler publicly declared at a June 22 board meeting that no restroom assaults had occurred[cite: 4, 137, 138].
Scott Smith’s Arrest and Gubernatorial Pardon: Parent Scott Smith was tackled and arrested at the June 22 Loudoun County meeting while confronting officials over his daughter’s assault[cite: 4, 38]. He was aggressively prosecuted by a Commonwealth’s Attorney who was later disqualified from the case by a circuit judge for lack of impartiality, before Smith received a full gubernatorial pardon from Governor Glenn Youngkin[cite: 4, 38, 39].
Targeted Retaliation Against Parent Advocates: Parent activist Ian Prior testified that after being designated “enemy number one” on a local school board list, he faced online defamation, had mailers sent urging neighbors to shun him, received a box of coal on Christmas Eve, and had his home’s electronic dog fence wiring severed[cite: 48, 49].
Presidential Phone Call and Board Appointment: On October 6, 2021, President Biden placed a personal 15-minute phone call to NSBA President Dr. Viola Garcia to thank her for submitting the letter[cite: 23, 81]. One week later, on October 13, 2021, Dr. Garcia was appointed to the federal National Assessment Governing Board[cite: 23, 81, 82].

Occasionally, I’m asked why things are as they are; let’s say our literacy disaster. I’ve long found the League of Women Voters lobbying AGAINST AB446, a predecessor of Act 20 to be informative. – From an ongoing history of our disastrous literacy results:

Curiously, among the organizations that registered against AB446 — a predecessor of 2023’s Act 20 — was the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, lobbying [screenshot, just in case] on the same side as the teachers’ union (WEAC) and the state’s school‑board and administrator associations.

Season with then Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 (!) Madison Rotary Club remarks:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.”

A 2013 interview with then California Governor Jerry Brown further illuminates this topic:

“In an April 2013 FT interview (“Second coming”), Jerry Brown was asked about the reports of a lasting feud with Bill Clinton after their 1992 primary fight. He replied:

“There was no feud. No permanent enemies, no permanent friends … only permanent interests. Somebody said that. A Frenchman?”

An aide sitting nearby checked a phone and supplied the actual source: Lord Palmerston. The line Brown was paraphrasing is Palmerston’s 1848 statement that Britain had “no eternal allies, and … no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.”

The same interview also covers the 1992 debate in which Brown accused Clinton of funneling state business to Hillary Clinton’s law firm, and Clinton’s famous reply that Brown was “not worth being on the same platform” as his wife. Brown’s point in 2013 was that the old clash had not hardened into a permanent personal enmity.”

———

Tom Elliott:

Unsurprisingly @jaketapper makes many appearances in the latest set of Fauci diary entries … note Fauci humblebrags about hanging out w/ “A List” people:

Dec. 10, 2016: “Went to of Nora O’Donnell (CBS) and Geoff Tracy (Chef Geoff’s) at [redacted]. Virtually the entire Washington, DC press corps were there plus the usual A list people. Had great conversations with Jake Tapper (CNN) about the potential impact of a Trump administration on Science and NIH.”

Dec. 2, 2017: “Went to the (now) annual Holiday and Geoff Tracy on [redacted]. Heavy with media people and A-list folks. Had good conversations with Norah about the Charlie Rose issue and with Jake Tapper about the Trump fiasco. Judy Woodruff, Al Hunt, Mary Hager (producer for “Face the Nation”, etc. Really an enjoyable night.”

Plus the usual array of fluff interviews …

Vision Screening

Teagan King:

Madison students will get free eye exams, prescription glasses and other care directly at school through an expanded partnership between the Madison School District and two nonprofits.

The Madison School Board approved a new Vision Van program at its meeting Monday, providing students with school-based vision screenings, referrals for specialized care and free glasses.

The district added nonprofit Vision to Learn to its existing Bright Eyes partnership with nonprofit Combat Blindness International, which has provided vision screenings to a portion of Madison students at no cost since 2014.

……

All students, regardless of ability to pay, are eligible to reduce barriers for students in accessing eye care. An agreement between Vision to Learn and the Warby Parker Pupils Project, which partners with local groups to provide screenings and glasses, covers the costs

k-12 Governance Diversity Notes

Corrinne Hess:

School Boards for Academic Excellence was created in 2023 as the “reform-minded alternative to the National School Board Association.”

The group now operates in 38 states with 45 partner organizations.

In Wisconsin, the group’s partner is the conservative law firm the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

SBAE Executive Director David Hoyt said the group doesn’t typically work directly with school districts, but is in talks with the Watertown Unified School District to audit its curriculum.

“The status quo is not working for students, and we’re going to need to do things differently in order to improve academic outcomes,” Hoyt said. “I don’t know every single thing that happens in the school district of Watertown, so I won’t pretend to be an expert on the local issues there. But the interactions I’ve had with their administration and their school board, I think those are people whose hearts are in the right place, and they’re trying to make things better.”

The Watertown School District is located about halfway between Milwaukee and Madison and has about 3,000 students. According to the latest state report card, about 48 percent of students are “advanced” or “meeting” expectations for reading and 47 percent of students are “advanced or “meeting expectations for math.

In a Sept. 4 email to Watertown Interim Superintendent James Feil, Hoyt proposed SBAE would conduct an audit of existing math and reading curriculum and provide a report to how it aligns with state standards; conduct off-site training with the Watertown School Board and in-person governance training.

——-

@SBAENetwork favors maintaining and even elevating academic standards. Oh, it also opposes racial discrimination.

——-

There are plenty of Grant Industrial Complex k-12 examples. Here’s one: Gates Foundation small learning communities.

———-

A deep dive into this topic is long overdue, particularly taxpayer funds moving through various NGO and higher education orifices.

Still Discriminating

Cremieux

On June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court declared by a 6-2 vote that American universities that accept federal funds were no longer allowed to racially discriminate when making admissions decisions. The case—SFFA v. Harvard—concerned the fact that Harvard was making decisions using students’ race as a variable in admissions.

Advocates on the side of Harvard argued that racial discrimination was necessary practice to preserve diversity. Opponents argued that racial discrimination was wrong and illegal. The opponents are best described as ‘correct’; but the advocates do also have a point, albeit one that should only be responded to with ‘So what?’: racially-fair admissions should undermine diversity, because certain groups—namely, Asians and Whites relative to Blacks and Hispanics in the U.S.—tend to have higher levels of academic achievement.

So, three years on, has the verdict in SFFA v. Harvard resulted in universities becoming less ‘diverse’ and more reflective of what a fairly-admitted student body would look like? The answer is ‘partly’, not entirely. A recent article in Econ Journal Watch looked into this and reached just that conclusion. But why? From the changes or lack thereof alone it’s hard to tell. But the most likely possibility is that universities are still discriminating even though the Supreme Court has declared doing that to be illegal.

The Department of Justice has been looking into this issue using the methods I outlined when I showed that Columbia and NYU were still discriminating. They’ve recently opened cases against UCLA’s medical school, Yale’s medical school, UC Davis’ medical school, UC San Diego’s medical school, Duke Law School, George Washington’s medical school, UC Berkeley Law School, UC San Francisco’s medical school, and UCLA Law School. They’ve also sued Harvard for withholding race-related admissions documents, run broader compliance reviews at Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Irvine, and began a broader investigation into fifteen medical schools.

Every university the DOJ has opened an investigation into so far is almost-certainly discriminating. We know this because each of the universities shows a considerably higher odds of admissions for students from favored racial groups—Blacks and Hispanics—as opposed to the ones that universities have historically wanted to discriminate against—Whites and Asians:

The education system’s failing report card

Globe and Mail:

Canada received a devastating report card last month, showing how academic test scores are collapsing and the country’s education system is failing students.

Canadian 15-year-olds’ performance on science, math and reading, which has been dropping for two decades, reached new lows on the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

The chart below shows that since 2006, Canada has declined by 37 points in reading, 42 points in math, and 24 points in science. The drop is equivalent to one to two years of lost learning for the average student.

Other tests, such as the international TIMSSmathematics assessment, and Ontario’s EQAO tests in math, reading and writing, also show Canadian students are struggling to master the basics.

Canadians shouldn’t be reassured by the fact that the country remains a relatively strong performer globally,tied for 12th in reading, and ranking 11th in math and ninth in science out of the 91 countries and economies evaluated on PISA. In the year 2000, Canada was second in reading, sixth in math and fifth in science out of the 32 countries measured that year.

Paul W. Bennett, director of the Schoolhouse Institute and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, says that between 2015 and 2025, Canada’s deterioration was around 8 to 9 points worse than the average OECD decline in each subject.

“It’s strange that in our society, expertise is important in just about all professions except teaching”

Paul Kirschner, Nidhi Sachdeva:

This is the second in a series of posts about teacher expertise. The first is here.

It’s strange that in our society, expertise is important in just about all professions except teaching. It’s ‘normal’ that expertise matters in medicine, engineering, aviation, law, and architecture. We don’t say, “Any experienced pilot will do,” or “A surgeon with a decent survival rate is good enough.” Yet in education we’re strangely enough tempted to treat teaching as though ‘good enough’ is good enough and that it’s possibly more important to look at things like personality, enthusiasm, or simply enough years in the classroom than expertise.

Spoiler alert!! Good enough isn’t good enough.

Teaching’s a very serious profession with expertise at its core. The problem is that teacher expertise is often hidden in plain sight. When we look at an expert teacher it looks really easy. They explain things clearly, quickly notice student confusion, ask the right questions at the right times, and shift the pace, adjust their examples, and respond to errors and misconceptions in ways that seem almost natural. And that apparent ease is misleading, because all of this is possible as a result of expertise.

Great teaching isn’t accidental, mystical, or reducible to charisma or other personality traits. It’s built on knowledge, judgment, and years of deliberately working on the gradual development of expertise.

Good teaching vs. expert teaching

Let’s begin with a subtle but essential distinction. A good teacher is already doing something difficult and important. Good teachers know their subject, plan thoughtfully, manage their classrooms, explain and instruct, and care about their pupils. None of this is trivial. But expert teaching goes further. Expert teachers don’t simply do the basics better. They see more, notice more, infer more, and respond more precisely.

That matters because classrooms are complex and full of ambiguity. While one pupil’s silence may mean they’re thinking deeply, by another it could signal confusion, disengagement, anxiety, or just mind-wandering. A correct answer may signal deep understanding, but it may also reflect superficial rehearsal or even luck. A noisy classroom may be productive or chaotic and a quiet one may be focused or anxious. Teaching is full of subtle (and not so subtle) signals that must be interpreted and acted upon. Expertise lies partly in knowing which signals matter, what they’re likely to mean, and what then to do.

———-

Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024: Wisconsin Educator Preparation Programs

Why America’s professional elite are so interested in sex acts at universities

Philip Greenspun:

A search for “cornell nytimes.com” yields a full page of results related to students having purportedly engaged in various sex acts on campus back in 2024:

Nothing newsworthy other than one night of sex has occurred at an Ivy League institution with 26,500 students and more than 3,000 faculty members. How is that possible? Catherine Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, explains in Virtue Hoarders:

For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes.

The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable. It was after 1968 that the PMC gradually shifted its allegiance from workers to capital. Since that time, the most successful and visible segments of the PMC have brazenly put their smarts at the service of the bosses.

As a class, the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. Tolerance for them is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning.

How can the elites in the PMC serve their capitalist overlords? Distract people from serious attempts to confiscate and transfer wealth from the most successful capitalists, e.g., the billionaires who can’t buy Bernie, to the deserving working class. What’s a good distraction? College students having sex.

———

The ultimate process clusterfuck.

So embarrassing:

A is for Average

Esteban Elizondo:

At Yale University, an A officially means “excellent.” But in the 2024-25 academic year, more than four out of every five undergraduate grades fell in the A range.

A recent Yale Daily News report found that 80.75 percent of grades awarded at Yale College were As or A-minuses, up from 78.97 percent in 2022-23 and 67.23 percent in 2010-11.

American post K-12 system in crisis

ColonelRETJohn Mills:

I am very supportive of a post K-12 system that actually creates and delivers tangible value in science, math, technology, and other actual skills and capabilities.

Degrees in Women’s Studies, Transgenderism, psychology, etc. are interesting, but deliver graduates that have little to offer but street protests, purple hair, and poorly made coffee.

Cornell just published a report stating the obvious.

$400,000 for a four year degree in nothingness is a waste of everyone’s time, except for the racket of the current post K-12 system and the Federal Student Loan Program that is being largely shut down by the Trump Administration.

There is nothing in the Constitution about a perpetual Education Industrial Complex that is a front for money laundering.

All I can say on this one is that I’m not tired of winning and happy to see the post K-12 system run into the brick wall of reality.

Governance: The collapse of Badger football is not a football story

Transcript, slides & audio:

On October 1 at the Pyle Center, UW–Madison economist Ananth Seshadri gave a talk with a deliberately provocative title and a serious argument underneath it. Wisconsin went from nine wins in 2021 to four in 2025. He doesn’t think the explanation is play-calling.

His case is that the university has a pattern. Wisconsin built the winning football model of the 1990s by finding undervalued players, developing them and keeping them. Then the rules changed: schools can pay players directly and players can transfer freely. The old advantage stopped working, and the response was slow.

He argues the same slowness shows up elsewhere. Indiana built the Kelley School while Wisconsin’s business school sank. Wisconsin founded a computer science department in 1964 and was still reorganizing its structure decades after the market moved. Tuition has been frozen by statute for years, which he calls a price control. Capital projects run through a state process that takes years longer than it takes peers to build.

Football, in his telling, is just the version everyone can see. If an economics department loses five faculty, nobody notices. If a football team loses, 80,000 people do.

His proposals are institutional: let prices rise, move money toward where demand actually is, give athletics the ability to borrow and decide quickly, and be honest about who carries the risk.

The full transcript is online with all 93 slide photographs placed where they were taken, plus the audio. Select any timestamp to hear that moment of the talk.

Readers may find Marc Eisen’s coverage of David Krakauer’s time at the Wisconsin Institute of Discovery worth a look.

The Real State of Education

Elizabeth Wolnik:

More taxpayer-supported spending on education doesn’t equal better academic results. That’s the central finding of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s September 2026 report, The Wisconsin Education Comeback: A Roadmap for Student Success, released the day before State Superintendent Jill Underly’s State of Education address. WILL documents and lays out what the real state of K12 education in Wisconsin – near-record per-pupil spending, slow pandemic recovery, declining NAEP scores on the Nation’s report card from pre-pandemic highs, and a weak link between extra dollars and better student outcomes. Wisconsin once ranked among the nation’s strongest academic performers, but progress slowed after the reforms of the 2010s. NAEP scores have declined from pre-pandemic levels despite record levels of funding.

Wisconsin remains above average in eighth-grade performance but has slipped in some earlier grades and subjects, and its standing looks worse after demographic adjustment. Wisconsin still has the largest black-white achievement gap in the country among states. Recovery from pandemic learning loss has been slower than in many states, and WILL notes that Wisconsin’s decision to close public schools during COVID was devastating. Among states with available data, Wisconsin ranks 33rd of 38 in math recovery and 30th of 35 in reading recovery since 2022. Students remain roughly one-third of a grade level behind their 2019 peers in math and more than half a grade level behind in reading.

What’s more, DPI has made those trends harder to track. Wisconsin once aligned Forward Exam proficiency with NAEP benchmarks. In 2023-24 the department changed that approach. The new categories are not comparable with prior years, so parents and policymakers cannot easily measure long-term progress.

The money is already substantial. Average revenue per student stands at $18,746, placing Wisconsin in the middle of the pack nationally. Enrollment has fallen 5.8 percent since 2013-14 and is projected to drop another 11 to 16 percent over the next decade. The number of non-charter public schools fell only about 2 percent. Staffing rose 13.5 percent. Districts have gone to referendum at record rates while avoiding meaningful consolidation. At the same time, Mississippi moved from 49th to 9th in fourth-grade reading between 2013 and 2024 while spending well below the national average. Utah spends less per pupil than almost every state yet ranks among the top performers. Both examples, and a large body of research, show that how dollars are used matters more than how much is spent.

Wisconsin already offers private choice, charters, and open enrollment. Research finds positive academic outcomes for choice participants at lower public cost, about $5,980 less per K-8 student and $3,486 less per high-school student. However, nearly 70 percent of families remain ineligible for the statewide parental choice program because of income caps. Entry-point rules also block many students who attended private school the prior year. Other states have moved to universal eligibility. WILL also warns of renewed efforts to roll back choice and Act 10.

——-

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 4:30–6 p.m. ET

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

The Modern Superintendent: School and Civic Leader Event

Location: Harvard Graduate School of Education

Longfellow Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138

Overview

HGSE’s new Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leaderhelps superintendents navigate political challenges, build trust, and lead effectively. Join us to explore their evolving civic role in a changing landscape for education and democracy.

HGSE faculty member Jennifer Cheatham and three former superintendents, who are currently Senior Fellows for the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader, will focus on what it means to lead school systems as democratic institutions: building broad-based coalitions across sectors; engaging families, students, and communities as partners rather than constituents; navigating polarization and misinformation; and using the bully pulpit of the superintendency to advance inclusion, equity, and civic engagement.

Panelists will share concrete examples of civic leadership in action—from community-wide visioning processes to cross-agency collaborations and student voice initiatives—and reflect on the skills, dispositions, and supports superintendents need to sustain this work over time.

This forum invites educators, policymakers, students, and community members to consider how superintendents can help renew faith in public institutions, foster civic learning and participation, and ensure that school systems serve as engines of both academic excellence and democratic vitality.

Welcome: Martin West, Academic Dean and Shattuck Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Moderator: Jennifer Cheatham, Chair of the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader, Senior Lecturer on Education, and Faculty Chair of Field Engagement, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Former Superintendent, Madison, WI

Speakers – Senior Fellows, Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Russell Booker, CEO, Spartanburg Academic Movement; Senior Fellow, The EdRedesign Lab, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Former Superintendent, Spartanburg, SC
Kyla Johnson-Trammell, CEO, Oakland Thrives; Former Superintendent, Oakland, CA
Michael Matsuda, Executive in Residence, Loyola Marymount University School of Education; Former Superintendent, Anaheim, CA

Event Attendance & Registration

Askwith Education Forums are accessible, free, and open to the public unless otherwise noted. Registration is required. Please arrive at least 15 minutes early for seating, to engage with the community, and to enjoy light refreshments before the Forum.

Virtual registrants will receive a Zoom link the day before the event.

An invitation to speak at the Harvard Graduate School of Education does not imply an endorsement of the speaker’s views or values by HGSE, Harvard University, or members of its community.

For accessibility needs or accommodation requests, please contact askwith@gse.harvard.edu in advance of the program. See the FAQ tab for details.

————

2013: What will be different, this time? 2019: Jennifer Cheatham and the Madison Experience

More.

Reality Slaps College Graduates In The Face

I & I Editorial Board

The job market is booming for young people – but not those with college degrees. Are employers finally coming to realize that colleges these days mainly produce coddled, know-nothing, whiny, entitled brats?

A recent analysis from Burning Glass Institute found that unemployment among those 22-34 years old without a college degree is lower than it’s been in decades, but those with college diplomas are having a much harder time finding work than before.

“For most of the past two decades, the two groups largely tracked each other, in good economic times and bad, the Wall Street Journal reported. “Now, though, just as job hunters without degrees are having one of their best runs, those with college educations are having one of their worst.”

The Journal says that AI is contributing to this unprecedented education divergence in job prospects, because companies are replacing entry-level white-collar jobs with AI just as colleges churn out more graduates than ever. At the same time, the shortage of skilled workers is making it hard to replace the many who are now retiring.

There clearly is a mismatch. But this isn’t exactly new. The oversupply of college graduates and lack of skilled workers has been a long-time problem. Former “Cheers” star John Ratzenberger, for example, has been raising the alarm about skilled worker shortages for decades.

So why is it affecting employment opportunities now?

Here’s a clue.

A Columbia University professor recently won a national book award for a volume arguing that white paint is racist. We kid you not.

“I discovered numerous examples of the way that it figured into systems of erasure, exclusion, violence, and the masking of power in the social and natural world,” said author Wendy Walters.

The latest free speech news

Greg Lukianoff:

It’s at once hard to believe it’s already been 25 years and, given the job, to feel like that’s way too short a time. I feel like I’ve gotten to be 20 different people since I started at FIRE. I was hired at 26, had just turned 27 by my first day of work, and the following 25 years have included some of the hardest years of my life and many of the best.

But here I am, having gone from working with five other people to a team of 140 of the best and most principled people in the business, getting to do the work I went to law school specifically to do.

So after 25 years, what are my plans for the rest of my career? More, harder, bigger, smarter.

FIRE has become an important force for good in the United States and for the future of free speech, and I want to make sure we remain one. I want us to reach more people, help more people who are censored, create even better precedent, and help educate a generation—or more—about the eternally radical idea of free speech and why we must never take it for granted.

Thanks to everyone who helped make these amazing 25 years possible. And given that my dad just turned 100 and seems to be doing pretty well, I’m aiming for another 50.

Public schools see ‘money on the table’ in education tax credit designed for private school choice

Erica Meltzer, Melanie Asmar:

Tutoring. SAT prep. Summer camp. Field trips.

These are just some of the things that education advocates hope to offer public school students through the federal scholarship tax credit, a major school choice expansion that has the potential to become the one of the largest sources of federal funding for schools.

The list includes things that well-off families provide their own children as a matter of course, as well as things that public schools used to provide that now feel like luxuries.

A small but growing set of organizations — school districts, charter schools, public school foundations, start-up nonprofits, and after-school providers — is working to turn a tax credit primarily designed to cover private school tuition into a benefit for public school students. The extent of their success could determine how many children are ultimately helped by the tax credit, and influence whether more Democratic governors in particular opt their states into the program.

“Critics would say this wasn’t created for us,” said Sara Hazel, the president and CEO of the Denver Public Schools Foundation, which raises money for Colorado’s largest school district and hopes to use tax-credit dollars for tutoring and after-school scholarships. “I believe there’s money on the table, and public school students should benefit from that. That’s the bottom line of why we’re doing this.”

Some are enthusiastic, like New York charter school leader Ian Rowe, who wants his students to have, yes, SAT prep, but also horizon-expanding experiences like going up in small planes with trained flight instructors to spark an interest in aviation and aerospace careers.

Why So Many Social Science Claims Are False

Christopher J. Ferguson:

One of the most urgent questions facing society today is the potential impact of AI on education and labor markets. So it’s no surprise that two scientists attempted to provide an answer, producing a meta-analysis suggesting that incorporating ChatGPT in schooling dramatically improved student outcomes. Social media and online sources promoted the 2025 study as a beacon of bright light.

The problem is that the researchers’ conclusions were later found to be unreliable, and the study was retracted in April – another blow to the public’s faith in science.

Scientists are increasingly chasing answers to big questions in fields from health care to climate change to AI. The academic research industry incentivizes them to produce the biggest possible findings that make for splashy headlines and career promotions. But such discoveries are rare in science, and too often, the result is widespread exaggeration, dodgy methods, and miscommunication.

“The incentive structure of modern science is such that a ‘simplify, then exaggerate’ strategy has become dominant, even if only tacitly,” according to a recent academic review. “To get published in leading journals, to be awarded grants and to be hired as a postdoc or faculty member, a system-wide bias for novelty, exaggeration and storytelling has emerged.”

Julia Pilarski on how Detroit is using drones, GIS, and high school pilots to transform economic development

Sally French

Drones are increasingly showing up at the intersection of spatial analysis, regional planning and site selection. One of the leaders driving that integration is Julia Pilarski, Project Manager of Real Estate & GIS at the Detroit Regional Partnership (DRP).

Julia Pilarski is the Project Manager of Real Estate & GIS at the Detroit Regional Partnership (DRP) and an FAA Part 107 Certified Drone Pilot. At the intersection of technology, economic development, and spatial strategy, Julia leads industrial site identification across an 11-county region while overseeing the Verified Industrial Properties (VIP) portal, GIS integrations, and drone aerial operations. In addition to teaching herself web design to build better digital tools for site selectors, Julia actively cultivates Detroit’s future tech pipeline through her work with the VIP x CODE313 Drone Pilot Program, empowering youth with hands-on drone skills and STEAM career pathways.

Julia sat down with The Drone Girl to discuss how aerial imagery transforms site selection, how Detroit is building an urban drone corridor and how self-taught skills shape high-level regional strategy.

Investing for babies involves knotty trade-offs

The Economist:

ATIENCE, CONSISTENCY and frugality are fine habits for an investor. They are not, however, common virtues among newborn babies. The little bundles of joy are impulsive short-term thinkers. They are also some of nature’s biggest freeloaders, living entirely beyond their means.

All the same, for new parents with a soft spot for the magic of compounding, like your columnist, a baby presents a tantalising investment opportunity. Many decades of life and potential returns stretch out into the future: $1,000 invested today with a real annual return of 5.2% (the average for global stocks over the past 125 years) would be worth $58,000 by the time the child is 80.

Treasury releases rules for nation’s first federal school voucher program

Lauren Lumpkin:

The Trump administration took a major step Thursday toward launching the nation’s first federally funded school voucher program, set to steer billions of tax dollars to private schools — but also, perhaps, to public school students.

The Treasury Department released long-awaited rules that will govern the first-of-its-kind effort before it’s implemented in January. States must decide whether to participate, and many Democratic governors had said they would wait for the regulations before making a decision.

It’s a tricky call. Most of these governors oppose voucher programs, which direct public money to private schools. But in this case, the program is funded entirely with federal money, so if they don’t participate, they will be passing up an opportunity to funnel additional dollars into their states’ public schools.

The voucher-like program, called the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, was created by last year’s giant Republican tax and spending bill. It provides a 100 percent tax credit for donations to scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs), which will pass along the money to families. It was designed to primarily benefit students attending private schools, but SGOs may also be set up to help pay out-of-pocket expenses for public school students, further complicating the politics for Democrats.

Governors have until Jan. 1 to opt in. Thirty mostly Republican-led states have already joined. Most of the remaining states that have not rejected the plan are led by Democrats.

The proposed regulations include income limits for eligible families, protections for scholarship funds, and details on how the funds can be used. States cannot restrict the types of schools that benefit, Treasury and Education department officials said, meaning public funds could go toward a religious school that bars LGBTQ students or a private school that doesn’t have certified teachers.

There will be a 60-day public comment period on the proposed rules.

(How) Do We Teach Emotions?

Anjali Adukia, Matthew Bonci, Paula Dastres Gallardo, Emileigh Harrison, Jake Nicoll & Teodora Szasz:

Emotional intelligence constitutes a key component of human capital, shaped partially by educational materials. Using machine learning and generative AI tools, we examine emotional content in public-school textbooks and children’s literature. A stark mismatch emerges: text exposes children to a broad emotional range, but images overwhelmingly depict happiness and calm, regardless of emotions described in text on the same page. Nearly half of pages show zero overlap between the emotions described in text and those shown in images. This pattern persists across time, contexts, and identities. Household purchases and library inventories suggest content may be endogenously shaped by consumer demand favoring “positive” cover imagery, implying market forces narrow the emotional landscape children encounter.

“From the Garden of Eden to the president’s Cabinet meetings, apple-polishing has a sorry history”

Matthew Gwyther:

Matthew Gwyther, a freelance journalist, last month produced and presented the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Sucking Up: A Guide to Sycophancy Through the Ages.”

We cannot say we weren’t warned. The Trump administration might be writing its own chapter in the history of toadyism, but the perils of sycophancy have been made clear since the Garden of Eden. In “Paradise Lost,” John Milton conjures the scene as the satanic serpent beguiles Eve with a silken- and fork-tongued speech telling her that she’s almost as beautiful as God himself:

You Can’t Educate Your Way to “Social Justice”

Musa al-Gharbi:

To recap: the education system in the U.S. has long been defined by a deep cultural contradiction. On the one hand, advocates for mass education hoped to use the classroom to integrate the marginalized and uplift the disadvantaged. On the other hand, their conception of these “others” was bigoted and condescending and elites’ desire to empower others was tempered by their greater desire to preserve and enhance their own social position and to keep the poor and minorities “in line.”

In practice, irrespective of intent, mass and elite education work synergistically to reinforce and legitimize social inequalities. When this mystificationsystem is functioning well, inequalities derived from differences in educational attainment and educational “quality” come to be viewed as natural and appropriate. They come to be seen as reflecting, first and foremost, the superior grit, discipline, hard work and cultivated talent of those who manage to get degrees (and especially elite degrees) as compared to those who don’t.

As beneficiaries proceed from elite pre-K, to elite primary and secondary schools, to elite colleges, and into elite jobs at elite firms, they grow increasingly confident they “deserve” or are entitled to the comfortable jobs, above-average (dual) incomes, and relatively stable homelives that likely await them. Over time, an implicit (and often explicit) conviction will grow that those with fewer or lower-status credentials are reciprocally unworthy of working the same jobs, enjoying the same lifestyles, and being afforded the same respect or deference as people like themselves.

The elitist side of this cultural contradiction has been a very successful project. The egalitarian side of the contradiction has been much less effective. Basically, nothing works well in the education space to reduce observed disparities in academic performance, let alone broader socioeconomic divides. Virtually all efforts have been great disappointments.

For instance, you might think the big difference between rich and poor students is the funding available to each. You’d be wrong: the schools with the most poor and minority students generally receive more per capita than those catering to the richest and whitest students. More importantly, there just isn’t a strong connection between spending, educational outcomes, and long-term life prospects.

Governments in the U.S. spends an average of $17.6k per student per year in public schools. The average private school tuition nationwide is $15k per student per year (i.e. 15 percent less than public school allocations). The latter tend to have higher test scores, graduation rates, college completion, and lifetime earnings. Throwing still more money at public schools is unlikely to erase observed differences in outcomes.

———

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Reading Achievement and the Long Tail of the Pandemic

Timothy Shanahan:

The latest reading test results should be troubling to all.

I’m reacting to the PISA results that were recently issued (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2026). PISA – Programme for International Student Assessment – is the test used to compare nations in academic performance. These reading, math, and science results were from a 2025 test administered in 91 countries.

Usually, our concerns about PISA scores have had to do with how many countries have passed us this time in the reading ability of their 15-year-olds. Not this time. No, this year we held service – no new nations outdid us.

But only because almost everyone declined in reading this time around.

It appears to me that this nearly universal drop is mainly because of the 2020 pandemic. The first shock of the pandemic deprived most kids out of face-to-face teaching for a year or two. That certainly trimmed their reading sails.

But the aftershock of this kind of thing can be almost as humbling. Historical analyses of pandemics reveal that they leave in their wake a tsunami of antisocial and asocial behavior. That’s why we experienced increased crime rates that have only recently begun to come down in most places.

The asocial effects seem to be lingering longer. The schools of many countries have been experiencing the same chronic absenteeism rife in the United States. Many kids never returned to school after COVID and large numbers of those who did have spotty attendance (Barragan Torres, 2025; U.S. Department of Education, 2025).

Time matters when it comes to learning. Fewer days, fewer hours, fewer lessons means lesser gains in academic achievement (Carroll, 1989; Fisher, Berliner, Filby, Marliave, Cahen, & Dishaw, 1981; Gay, Sonnenschein, Sun, & Baker, 2021; Smith, Lee, & Newmann, 2001; Walberg, Fraser, & Welch, 1986).

The PISA report itself emphasizes an unfortunate decline in classroom discipline across the world since COVID. There is more misbehavior these days which reduces the amounts of instruction even for those kids who manage to show up.

———

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

RQ1, Seth Lewis, Nick Mathews:

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Gangs: 2 people shot at Eden Prairie homecoming game, stadium evacuated

Sam Siedow:

Eden Prairie High School’s football game against Minnetonka was evacuated on Friday night amid a reported shooting and a major police response.

The Eden Prairie Police Department said officers responded to the homecoming game at about 8:40 p.m. after a report of shots fired.

At an emergency news conference outside an Eden Prairie fire station, police said two people were shot and suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Both were taken to Hennepin County Medical Center for treatment.

In an 11:42 p.m. Facebook post, the Eden Prairie Police Department said the shooting is believed to have been targeted, and that no arrests have been made. The department said the investigation is ongoing and that additional information will be provided as it becomes available.

———

Jason Robertson:

Eden Prairie MN had their Homecoming Football Game shut down because of Somali Gang Fights.

150+ Somali started a gang fight at their Homecoming game

I don’t think people not from here will understand how big of a deal that is

Eden Prairie/Edina, that whole corridor of cities are first ring suburbs of Minneapolis and are the Safe, Nice, Rich Neighborhoods

——-

Mary Moriarty:

Let us be very clear: there are no “roving Somali gangs terrorizing people.”

The Trump administration is, once again, using a campaign of hatred and fear to try and divide us.

It will not work.

——-

Becka Thompson:

practice the school protects kids from the law. This is because almost all districts got rid of school resource officers. They shield them from the law because they don’t want to deal with mom and dad, or they think they can rehabilitate at school or, yes, they’re ACAB activists.

No matter what the route it leads teens to not have any “soft accountability” before making the choice to bring a gun to school.

Years ago I had a Somali parent ask me what to do with their child. They were a mother and they feared for their child but that boys don’t listen to their mothers past age 8 or so.

Get mad at me all you want, it’s my lived experience. In this long conversation I realized the cultural issues went way beyond them not listening to a female teacher.

I don’t need to put in the disclaimer “not all” but I will. I have had countless Somali students who were so respectful and kind and wanted to break out of that culture and “make it” in the USA.
By not enforcing laws and school rules we leave all of them vulnerable first.

When my Somali student was murdered and it was swept under the rug as “accidental” I knew in practice what my gut told me: by turning a blind eye, we first harm them. (And see hw quickly the news was willing to buy the absolutely stupid story of an ‘accident’ while ‘studying’)

———

Tom Weiler:

. @JonJustice , @StarTribune out did themselves with the update “2 injured”

2 injured during the evacuation?
2 injured players, cause long medical felay, fans evacuated

———

Bill Glahn:

Did the homecoming queen get a gun? As always, no arrests have been made, no victims named. These suburban disturbances appear to occur within a unique form of black holes, from which only certain information cannot escape, with local media standing guard at the event horizon, just to make sure.

I’ve mentioned the adjacent southwest suburban cities of Eden Prairie and Minnetonka a few times lately, as the two host the sprawling headquarters of the health insurance giant United Healthcare. The cities are prosperous and usually peaceful.

Until last night.

———-

Amanda:

first they came for the state fair and police negotiated with them. last year they shot up or threatened to shoot up multiple high school graduations including WAYZATA.

now they’re engaging in gang violence in Eden prairie and Minnetonka. For the non-Minnesotans who follow me, to put this into perspective, when I went to Minnetonka 10 years ago the nickname for our school throughout the state was “White Castle” because of how little diversity and wealthy everyone apparently was. The high school is so nice it feels like a college campus.

———-

John Hindraker

Every Democratic politician immediately chimed in to try to make the story about guns rather than Somali gang violence, but once again, no one is fooled. Firearms have been around for what, 600 years? And there has never been any shortage of firearms in Eden Prairie. It isn’t guns that are new, it is violent gangs. This story will continue to reverberate as voters make up their minds about the midterm elections

———-

The Eden Prairie Police Department has arrested 18-year-old Adam Abdihakeem Adam of St. Louis Park in connection with the Oct. 2 shooting outside Eden Prairie High School during the homecoming football game.

Adam, who police identified as the shooter, was taken into custody without incident at approximately 3:30 p.m. today, Oct. 8 at the intersection of Hwy. 55 and Penn Avenue in Minneapolis. He is being held at the Hennepin County Jail on probable cause for second-degree assault.

———

Much more.

Notes on flexible k-12 Governance

Will Flanders:

This article treats an apparently easy process to start a private school as if it’s a bad thing. I think low barriers to entry are great. The beauty of a private relative to a public school is if it doesn’t meet the needs of students, it will close.

Michael Torres:

Ok…so…in sum, a group of investigative reporters attempted to commit performative fraud (I guess?) by launching fake private schools in 3 ESA states, but didn’t do any investigation into the extent this performative fraud is happening in real life or prove that they could even recruit students/families to join their fake schools…all in an allusory attempt to establish a dearth of quality and thereby advocate for greater state regulation of private schools and microschools…and while conveniently leaving out research from @ua_edreform and NC State University showing students in these programs are performing very well academically.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…
bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/wordpressua.ua…

k-12 tax & $pending climate: ongoing property tax growth

Danielle DuClos:

For years, county leaders have authorized budgets where spending outpaced anticipated revenues, looking to reserves, or rainy day funds, to balance the books. The county’s chief financial officer estimated last spring the county would yet again face a more than $30 million deficit for 2027.

k-12 tax & $pending climate: Most of today’s higher prices are Biden-era inflation

Marc A. Thiessen:

Before the 2022 midterms, Americans were facing the worst inflation in 40 years, a collapse in real wages, the highest murder rate since the 1990s and the worst border crisis in U.S. history. Yet, despite these headwinds, Joe Biden got one of the best midterm results of any president since John F. Kennedy.

Well, today, things are better by nearly every metric. The border is secure, and the violent crime rate is falling at a historic pace. The poverty rate is at a record low. Real median household income is at the highest level since the Census Bureau began tracking it in 1967, while inflation was 3.4 percent in August — higher than most would like, but slightly below the post-1957 average. The economy is growing and has created over 1 million new private-sector jobs since President Donald Trump took office, and the unemployment rate is just 4.1 percent. Growth is being driven by the private sector, not by inflationary government handouts.

In other words, the economy is objectively in great shape. Nonetheless, polling shows that three-quarters of people rate it as poor or fair, and Republicans are bracing for a blue wave in November that could sweep them out of power on Capitol Hill.

So, what gives?

Here’s why so many are sour on the economy: Consumer prices today are 27.2 percent higher than they were in January 2021. Something that cost $100 when Biden took office now costs about $127. That is a massive increase in prices in just over five and a half years.

Biden bears the lion’s share of the blame for that cumulative increase. The c onsumer price index rose 21.4 percent from January 2021 to January 2025 (Biden’s term), while it has risen just 4.8 percent since Trump took office. In other words, of that $27 in rising costs, about $21 came on Biden’s watch, while about $6 was on Trump’s watch.

How nonprofit newsrooms are exploited by funders — and their own sense of calling

Welcome to another edition of RQ1! For those who are new, we are Mark Coddington, Seth Lewis, Tamar Wilner, and Nick Mathews — four former journalists turned academics, now teaching and researching at Washington and Lee University (Mark), the University of Virginia (Seth), the University of Kansas (Tamar), and the University of Missouri (Nick). This edition was written by Seth and Nick.

Quick programming note: We’re nearing 5,000 subscribers! Please help us cross that threshold and reach the people who could benefit from this work by forwarding this to a friend or sharing it on LinkedIn or elsewhere. We don’t ask for paid subscriptions, but we do appreciate whatever outreach you can provide.

In trying to keep pace with all the new research about news and journalism, we hope to give you in each edition a quick breakdown of a notable piece of new research, and also to highlight other interesting work you might want to check out. We can’t cover it all, of course, so consider this a sampling of some of the most interesting findings in news research.

If you have ideas or suggestions, please shoot us a reply — we’d love to hear from you. And if someone has shared this email with you, then you can subscribe here:

Over the past decade, nonprofit news has been seen as one of the bright spots in U.S. journalism — an emblem of hope for the future amid a landscape littered with failures and financial struggles.

With an average of 10 local newspapers closing each month, joining the thousands that have met that fate already, conditions out there are grim. Largely in response, more than 6,000 nonprofit foundations have made major investments in local news initiatives, totaling some half a billion dollars or more in direct funding for journalism. As a result, the number of U.S. nonprofit news organizations has been growing by double-digit percentages year-over-year, with an estimated 550 such organizations in operation.

It’s fair to question whether this is sustainable. But, in the meantime at least, what’s not to like about this arrangement — this major push to subsidize local journalism at a time when the for-profit model for it is rapidly vanishing?

Progress via mixed drinks

The simple Negroni can tell the story of a century of human progress.

My latest for @WSJFreeEx
https://t.co/gc2IURL8hQ

— Emma Camp (@emmma_camp_) October 1, 2026

How A Creepy Academic Shows What’s Wrong With American Religious Colleges

Jonathan Leaf

Georgetown University Islamic Studies professor Jonathan A. C. Brown is a jerk. That’s not what’s notable or important about him, however.

That he’s a creep is something he has repeatedly demonstrated. Brown is a descendant of President Grover Cleveland. Raised as an Episcopalian, Brown converted to Islam when he was in college, and he’s now a true believer, if one who displays the sense of entitlement of someone from the direct lineage of a U.S. president.

Thus, a few months ago, Brown responded to a British member of parliament’s expressions of concern about the Pakistani grooming gangs that raped tens of thousands of young Christian women by tweeting out, “Get over it.” When he was told that this was gross, immoral and insensitive, he said it a second time.

Trump Administration Limits Predatory Lending in Education

by Alex Tabarrok:

The New Republic writes “President Trump is banning students majoring in degrees that don’t make enough money from taking out college loans.” Yes, but do note that no student is banned from any major and the lending rule is mild. Undergraduate programs must show:

that their graduates earn more than the typical high school diploma holder…[and] graduate programs will be required to demonstrate that their graduates earn more than the typical bachelor’s degree holder. (emphasis added).

Think about how low that bar is. The comparison group for an undergraduate program is working adults aged 25-34 with nothing more than a high school diploma. A college program that can’t beat that has almost certainly made its students worse off. For graduate programs the bar is the lowest of several bachelor’s benchmarks, including bachelor’s holders in the same field. A master’s in social work need only beat people with a bachelor’s in social work. A program must also fail in two out of three years before it loses loan eligibility. The Department estimates that about 5% of programs will fail in the first year.

I mocked the term “predatory lending” when it first became common in the financial crisis but in this case predatory lending fits the bill because the real borrower isn’t the individual student. Under income-driven repayment, the taxpayer is a forced co-signer, and it’s the taxpayer who gets predated.

Most expansions of the student loan program have been motivated by the picture of an enterprising student who works hard and wants to major in mechanical engineering or nursing but because of their poor circumstances they can’t afford college. “Credit constraints, asymmetric information, you can’t collateralize human capital,” said the economists. Nice theory, what’s the practice?

qualia

tenobrus:

fundamentally i think most discussion of qualia gets the situation exactly backwards. the assertion tends to be that things like “seeing red” or “feeling joy/pain” are raw experiences, the fundamental unit of the universe, and it is both possible and important to identify those experiences in a highly substrate-independent manner.

i think the truth is that there’s no such thing as globally coherent mind-independent qualia. i think this is sort of obvious when you actually think about it. there is nothing it-is-like for you to be a whale. you are not a whale. the brainstates it experiences are quite different from your own. there is no plausible way to directly identify them. you can translate, but only lossily. what you think of as the qualia of “seeing red” is really “seeing red as you”. it is your humanbrainstate of seeing red. we have a little leeway on this. of course you can see red multiple times in your life and abstract over them and have a more general sense of seeing red. and likely the neural patterns that make up seeing red are abstractable somewhat, we can say that my seeing red is quite close or sanely translatable to yours. but the thing we are talking about when we talk about “seeing red” as humans is not some universally translatable platonic object out there in the universe. it’s a verbalization of our very specific brains. alien minds do not have red qualia. or pain qualia. or joy qualia.

that’s not to say alien minds can’t be conscious, and that’s not to say that they won’t see some wavelength and have some consistent correlated mindstates about it. but the question of “how do we identify those mindstates as being the same as ours when we see red?” sort of dissolves. they’re not the same, they’re obviously not the same. the raw experience is completely different. the whole thing we’re thinking of when we talk about experience is entirely about ourselves.

Upper Midwest School Board Leadership Conference

Leadership Institute:

About the Event

Save the date! Join us for a day of school board governance training at the Upper Midwest School Board Leadership Conference. This one-day event will bring together school board members, candidates, and education leaders from across the region for practical, solutions-focused training designed to strengthen leadership and improve governance.

Topics will include:

Effective school board governance and leadership
Robert’s Rules of Order and board procedures
Legal updates impacting school boards
Building productive board-superintendent relationships
Education policy and legislative developments
Parental rights and community engagement
Best practices for serving students and taxpayers
Strategies for leading with confidence and integrity

Whether you’re a newly elected or experienced board member, you’ll leave with practical tools, valuable connections, and actionable ideas to better serve your district and community.

Mark your calendar for November 14, 2026.

Notes on Elections, Governance and taxpayer funded k-12 $pending

Erin Gretzinger and Olivia Herken:

More and more Wisconsin school districts have gone to referendum in recent years, citing financial stress. Local property tax levies — which help fund public schools — have reachedthe highest level in over 30 years. Schools are experiencing staff shortages and budget shortfalls, and school leaders say student achievement is dropping as state funding hasn’t kept up with inflation.

Crowley and Tiffany’s plans on how to give the state’s education system a boost vary, and they have different priorities. Certain parts of their plans also lack details, leaving some funding questions up in the air.

Here’s more detail on both candidates’ plans:

———

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI and Jill Underly.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

k-12 tax & $pending climate: ‘The Heartland Visa’: The Push for a New Visa Category to Repopulate American Towns With Foreign Workers

Natalie Winters:

A think tank co-founded by Facebook’s first president wants at least 100,000 visas a year—and has already identified more than 1,700 counties that could qualify.

The ambition is national. EIG’s blueprint identifies more than 1,700 potentially eligible counties, home to 58 million people. It proposes a minimum of 100,000 visas annually.

These communities’ economic pain has become the sales pitch for changing who lives in them.

And the campaign is still being pushed in Washington.

EIG’s first-quarter 2026 lobbying disclosure lists Heartland Visas and the Heartland Visa Act of 2024. Its second-quarter filing, submitted July 20, names them again. Together, the filings report $360,000 in lobbying expenses across the organization’s policy agenda; they do not break out spending on this visa campaign.

The documents name John Lettieri and Catherine Lyons as lobbyists. This is an organized effort to turn a demographic proposal into federal policy.

LLM’s: A few thoughts, tips & tricks:

Andrej Karpathy:

We’ll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks:

Writing. Something I’ve had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it’s a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I’ve tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for “80% of the way to ASD-STE100” because the spec is quite stringent. But even better:

University of Wisconsin professors say teaching mandate leaves less time for students

Nadia Scharf:

A new state budget provision requires Universities of Wisconsin faculty to meet minimum credit hour teaching requirements.
Some professors worry the new policy does not account for other essential duties like research, grading, and student mentorship.
Faculty say some classes don’t map neatly onto credit hour requirements, which they worry could impact student experience.
One university leader says he doesn’t expect faculty responsibility to change much.

One month into the new school year, a new Universities of Wisconsin requirement that faculty members spend a certain number of hours in front of a class has meant frustration for many – not because of what they’re now required to do, but because of what they say it doesn’t account for.

In 2025, state legislators approved a last-minute state budget that increased funding for the Universities of Wisconsin, also known as the UW system, by $256 million, the largest increase in 20 years. But those funds came with strings: among them, UW faculty would be mandated to meet credit hour teaching requirements. These workload requirements went into effect at the start of this school year.

Under the new mandate, all full-time faculty and academic staff must teach at least 24 credits per academic year, with a carveout for UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, where professors are expected to produce more research. There, the minimum workload is 12 credits per year. A typical college class is three credits.

“They grow the state so they can grow the dues”

Aaron Withe

Thanks again to the Yale Political Union for inviting me to take part in such an important and spirited debate.

Resolution: “Ban Public-Sector Unions”
Result: 35 Yes, 25 No

In the UK, I watched my family get taxed to own a TV, taxed to drive a car, and hit with a 40% income tax rate and 20% sales tax. It was never enough, because nearly one in five workers is on the government payroll.

Public-sector unions don’t just bargain. They grow the state so they can grow the dues. That’s the model, and that’s why I argued to ban them.

———-

We didn’t wait to get fined. New York’s new law lets the attorney general investigate us and ask a court to block our mail before a single envelope goes out, just because we plan to tell public employees they can stop paying union dues.

———-

“Overfunded”

Notes and links on Wisconsin Act 10.

Notes on K-12 Budgets: Taxes & Spending amidst enrollment declines

Rebecca Loroff:

More schools are going to referendum as fewer voters indicate they want to support them. According to a Marquette University Law School poll from February, a record number of voters, 60% to 40%, said that lowering property taxes was more important than increasing funding K-12 for education. At the same time, the Wisconsin Policy Forum also found that 2025’s 94 referendum questions were the most in an odd-numbered year since 2007 and that almost 40% of these questions were “retries” — where voters rejected a referendum question, and a district goes back to the voters to try to pass the measure again.

Shaw said that while school referendums were originally meant as a way for communities to exercise local control, it seems to be contributing to funding gaps between districts. According to another report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the gap in per-pupil funding between the top 90% and the bottom 10% of districts has grown in the past 20 years from 24.6% in 2005 to 37.6% in 2025.

…..

The lawsuit was filed in April by Law Forward and the Wisconsin Education Association Council. The plaintiffs are the Wisconsin Public Education Network; the Wisconsin PTA; the Necedah, Adams-Friendship, Beloit, Green Bay and Eau Claire school districts; and other education associations and individuals. They are asking the court to rule the current school funding formula unconstitutional.

“We’ve exhausted every opportunity that democracy affords us in this work, and it seems to fall on deaf ears,” said Heather DuBois Bourenane, a Sun Prairie-based parent and director of Wisconsin Public Education Network. “If our lawmakers aren’t going to do their job, it’s time for the courts to hold them accountable for doing it.”

The group’s position is that the state needs to “align its spending priorities with the priority needs of our children,” DuBois Bourenane said

She called the current funding system “antiquated and deeply broken” and “picking winners and losers” among students.

“We have a school funding system that’s based more on property tax relief than it is on meeting the needs of kids,” she added, saying that Wisconsin has fallen short with students with disabilities, English language learners and students from lower-income households.

In response to the initial suit in April, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a statement, “This complaint is another meritless attempt by liberal activists to defund the state’s highly successful school-voucher program and interfere with the Legislature’s authority to fund public schools. We will vigorously defend against this suit and are confident that the courts will soundly reject it.”

Lawsuits related to school funding have had mixed success in court across the country. In 2000, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the state’s funding formula was constitutional, but left the door open for the current case to be brought.

As the lawsuit plays out, Shaw sees the next election as an opportunity for voters and their representatives to consider their priorities — and to envision “what equitable planning and adequate funding looks like” for their schools.

——-

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

“Overfunded”

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Galen Hendricks, Nick Johnson, Rita Jefferson:

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

How the Culture War Put Public Schools at Risk

Richard D. Kahlenberg:

For more than half a century after Milton Friedman proposed using taxpayer money to support students in private schools, the libertarian economist’s idea went almost nowhere. Republican presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, pushed vouchers—which help parents enroll their children in schools of their choice, including private and religious schools, at taxpayer expense—as a way to liberate poor children from failing big-city school districts. Those efforts led to voucher initiatives in a smattering of districts, such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. But in state after state, support for public schools—which take all comers and have historically played a crucial role in cultivating students’ common identity as Americans—was just too broad-based and too strong to get voucherlike programs approved on a larger scale.

In the past several years, though, voucher advocates have switched strategies to take advantage of the country’s ever-deepening political polarization. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation urged the voucher movement “to embrace the culture war” as a way of promoting school choice. As evidence of progressive overreach, the conservative think tank has pointed to “racial essentialism for third graders” and decried the presence in some school libraries of Gender Queer, a graphic novel that “features a picture of oral sex being performed on a sex toy.”

Conservative leaders in many state capitals have emulated Heritage’s tactics, and the tactical shift has helped persuade lawmakers to expand the supply of school vouchers. Amy Sinclair, the president of the Iowa state Senate, told an interviewer in 2023 that during the coronavirus pandemic, “many parents became aware of anti-American and explicit materials in their child’s classrooms and began to demand choice.” “There’s no reason why any students should have a woke agenda pushed on them,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a month later at a rally for private-school-choice legislation. The following year, his Arkansas counterpart, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, promoted her school-choice efforts by declaring on X, “We need kids learning math, reading, and science—not woke nonsense.” Since the pandemic, voucherlike programs have proliferated, and they are now open to even the richest students. In 2021, no states had universal programs supporting private education with public dollars; by 2025, 18 did. The number of students using publicly funded private-school-choice programs has tripled since the 2018–19 school year.

“The grant made me do it”

John Sailer:

Over the last half-decade, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on projects designed to influence academic policies, both in the sciences and other disciplines. The aim was to foster a progressive conception of social justice in these fields. In pursuit of this end, the foundation earmarked nearly a million dollars for a project titled “Creating Inclusive Scientific Societies through Policies and Practices,” over a million for a project on “Faculty Online Learning Communities for Gender Equity,” and over $2 million to foster “racial equity focused departmental change.”

Through a public records request, I’ve obtained the proposals and progress reports for dozens of NSF grants designed to promote social justice. Although funding for these grants was eventually halted by the Trump administration, the projects illustrate an important facet of recent higher-education policy. Many of the university policies that promised “social transformation” didn’t arise in a vacuum. They were actively encouraged by outside funders—often by the federal government itself.

Accreditation—the peer-review process which enables universities to receive federal grants and student loans—has recently become a policy battleground, with accreditors wielding significant power over both universities and academic disciplines. In 2020, when Oregon Health and Science University’s medical school issued an extensive diversity action plan—which promised “consequences” for employees who failed to support “DEI, anti-racism and social justice”—it specifically pointed to the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the medical-school accrediting body, to justify the overhaul.

The NSF actively promoted DEI-focused accreditation policies. The proposal for a $1.2 million program on promoting “community engagement” in STEM, which I obtained through a records request, notes that the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology was exploring changes to its criteria “that would incorporate JEDI [justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion].” The proposal promised to “support broader JEDI efforts in the general criteria for engineering.”

Another grant funded a conference designed to “identify and share best practices and strategies to integrate IDEA principles in accreditation criteria”—referring to an acronym that stands for “inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility.”

Scholarly societies have become another flashpoint in debates over higher education. Critics argue that many of these societies, which have the power to shape entire disciplines, have become increasingly politicized.

Again, through its giving, the NSF played a role in promoting this politicization. In one million-dollar grantthat received funding in 2024, a group of psychologists proposed a series of social-justice reforms to the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. The proposal, which I obtained via a records request, asserts that “[r]edistributing resources (such as moving different people into leadership roles) is not enough” and that the society’s “governance structures do not yet reflect its stated values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Its solution: review and rework the society’s criteria for leadership development, academic awards, conferences, and publications.

‘Patriotic’ Officer Training Program In Partnership With Select Universities

Rebeka Zeljko:

The program will include Louisiana State University (LSU), Liberty University, Tuskegee University, Mississippi State University (MSU), and Hillsdale College. Notably, LSU was founded as a military school in 1853, known as the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy.

Each member school will be designated a “Distinguished Military College,” requiring the institutions to maintain “exceptionally high standards of cadet discipline, tactical instruction, and military organization.” The schools would also earn the prestigious “Honor School” status, granting priority for officer commissioning. (RELATED: Hegseth Announces New Standards Targeting ‘Fat Generals’ And ‘Beardos’ At Quantico Meeting)

“From the Ivy Leagues to most liberal arts colleges, our colleges and universities have become anti-American, DEI-worshipping, woke factories,” Hegseth said during his State of the Force address. “Qualities like grit and courage were replaced with political correctness and social justice. God and country traded for Che Guevara and critical theory.”

——-

Hillsdale:

Hillsdale will fund its participation in the Corps of Cadets program without taxpayer funds, just as we replace G.I. Bill scholarships through the private generosity of donors. Our mission calls us to teach in order to ensure the blessings of civil and religious liberty carry on.

Universities must adapt quickly to AI to preserve the value of a college degree

Craig Warmke:

Universities that are slow to adapt risk a cascade of further problems. If students continue to use AI to elide cognitive friction, they will fail to master the material and enhance their skill sets. A hollowed-out education then threatens the credential’s credibility.

The public is already concerned: 46 percent of respondents in a July 2026 Gallup poll expected AI to make degrees less important over the next five years. AI could make degrees less important by providing motivated learners inexpensive alternatives with the chance to learn at an accelerated pace.

Cheaper AI alternatives could dampen student demand right when public confidence in higher education has already cratered. Merely 36 percent of adults with a bachelor’s degree expressed having at least “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Among all respondents with lower confidence, perceived political agendas, and high costs were the leading reasons. And these considerations exert negative pressures on demand amid a shrinking pool of potential college students due to demographic reasons.

The barbell strategy requires more human interaction, which requires more staff time. But perhaps AI could help finance the costs with savings elsewhere.

The district presented three options for plans that could close up to 16 schools as early as next year.

Jennifer Hoff

The district admits enrollment declines and budget woes continue, as the plan also redraws attendance boundaries and merges some programs.

“I don’t know if they’re really considering community and the families that will be truly impacted,” said Young.

District leaders answered most of the questions people brought forth and will hold six more listening sessions, including Thursday at Washburn High and Friday at Edison High that both start at 6 p.m.

The district vowed to bring the input to the school board that can make changes to the proposals, but is expected to vote on something Nov. 10.

The climate and hurricane doomers of Carnegie-Mellon move to Miami

Philip Greenspun:

For twenty years, Carnegie-Mellon University has been dishing out fat helpings of climate and hurricane doom.

What’s the most obvious place to set up a new campus for 3,500 students and keep them safe from ever-more-intense hurricanes and relentless sea level rise? How about Miami, Florida?

My misguided six-year foray into ‘social justice journalism’ (2016-2022)

Alexander Russo:

To get past the current education stalemate, journalists, practitioners, and parents need to rethink prior positions and efforts — starting with our own. I’ll go first.

I’ve always been skeptical about the practical and political feasibility of school integration — as well as the value of focusing on it as a school reform priority.

That much should be clear from all the writing and commentary I’ve done on the topic, including Some Questions About This American Life’s ‘The Problem We All Live With’ and Questioning 70 years of integration. (More links below)

But at the same time, I was for several years deeply convinced that the lack of racial diversity among education journalists was a core problem — that newsrooms needed to be integrated as much or more than schools — and that I should try and do something about it.

Some of my pieces from that era start with 2016’s Just how white is education journalism? all the way to 2022’s Racial diversity in education news? Two steps forward, one step back.

Only now am I realizing how misguided my efforts were, how much they contradicted my skepticism around school diversity, and how deeply rooted they were in my personal desire to avoid being seen as racist.

Why Don’t Colleges Get Rid of Their Bad Fraternities?

Caitlin Flanagan:

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck.

Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night’s miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and—in the fullness of time—pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him.

It takes a certain kind of personal-injury lawyer to look at the facts of this glittering night and wrest from them a plausible plaintiff and defendant, unless it were possible for Travis Hughes to be sued by his own anus. But the fraternity lawsuit is a lucrative mini-segment of the personal-injury business, and if ever there was a deck that ought to have had a railing, it was the one that served as a nighttime think tank and party-idea testing ground for the brain trust of the Theta Omicron Chapter of Alpha Tau Omega and its honored guests—including these two knuckleheads, who didn’t even belong to the fraternity. Moreover, the building codes of Huntington, West Virginia, are unambiguous on the necessity of railings on elevated decks. Whether Helmburg stumbled in reaction to an exploding party guest or to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is immaterial; there should have been a railing to catch him.

How the 50 Largest American Cities Raise Revenue and What That Means for Tax Equity

Overview

Big cities are important drivers of the American economy, and the taxes they collect fund public services that help those communities thrive.
While most local governments in the U.S. are largely funded by property taxes, large cities are a bit different, with more diverse revenue.
Only about half of the nation’s 50 largest cities rely mostly on property taxes. While all these cities collect at least some property tax revenue, the share varies.
Another third of the 50 largest cities collect the bulk of their revenue from consumption taxes.
The high reliance on property and sales taxes in these big cities results in low- and middle-income taxpayers paying a larger share of their incomes than high-income families in these places.
By contrast, three cities collect the largest share of their revenue from income taxes, and four other cities get at least some revenue from income taxes. Income taxes tend to tax low- and middle-income families less than higher-income families, injecting progressivity into local tax codes and improving fairness for taxpayers.

A comprehensive list of the responses to the Nikole Hannah-Jones article

The Education Gadfly

The viral article by Nikole Hannah-Jones— “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”—sparked an outpouring of responses from opinion writers far and wide, as did the accompanying This American Life episode. As a public service—and because of the opportunity I believe this moment provides to the school reform movement—I am tracking all of the posts we spot. If we missed any, please let us know at TheGadfly@fordhaminstitute.org. (Last updated October 1, 2026.)

—Mike Petrilli

——-

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

“Tech companies launching their own programs to train grads because they ‘can’t rely’ on Ivy Leagues”

Lydia Moynihan:

As the university system increasingly becomes a wildly expensive bastion of anti-Western sentiment, key figures in Silicon Valley are betting on alternatives to higher education. They argue that even the Ivy League is no longer producing the best candidates — nor are they even accepting some of the most qualified students.

“It used to be the case that you could rely on somebody who went to an Ivy or Ivy-equivalent to be top notch,” said Jordan Hirsch, who runs Palantir’s semester-long intensive Meritocracy Fellowship, which accepts high school graduates.“But that’s not the case anymore… we suspected that there was a lot of talent being missed.”

Palantir has become a pioneer of the effort to offer alternatives to the conventional four-year undergraduate degree — and now it’s planning to double the size of its third semester-long intensive.

The company’s four-month fellowship begins with a five-week crash course in Western civilization — studying philosophers like Aristotle and heroes like Churchill — with classes taught by visiting professors, journalists, and researchers alongside executives such as CEO Alex Karp and CTO Shyam Sankar.

In addition to spending the five weeks studying the classics and history, students also build software and later embed with a Palantir team for their assignments.

“What we’re trying to build is what we think the college environment should be — and do it in five weeks,” Hirsch said. “The mission is to support, sustain, and resuscitate the most important institutions, both commercial and government, in the West, in the United States in particular.”

He wants students to leave with an appreciation for “individual dignity, individual liberty, human agency, and… a real love for America, for all of its imperfections.”

Hirsch estimated that nearly 700 people applied last year for 26 slots. Applications for the next class open Oct. 15, and Palantir hopes to take as many as 50 fellows.

———

More:

It’s not school that’s dead. It’s the institutions that hijacked it. School, the real one—that of the Athenian Academy, the Renaissance workshops, the master and apprentice—is going to be reborn. More demanding. More just. Without debt, without dogma, without a degree as a lifelong annuity.

A school that will no longer produce graduates, but polymaths. Free minds, capable of coding, thinking, building, and doubting. They’re the ones who will create the value of the next fifty years.

———

Dissident Teacher:

I built an antidote to the America-as-villain history and English lessons taught in too many of our public schools.

I wish the schools would do this. I spent 24 years trying from the inside, but the system is too sclerotic. The older teachers are too comfortable to push back enough, the younger teachers too poorly educated. The curriculum companies are captured. The School Boards are tied down by state regulations.

———

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

“Overfunded”

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

249 (0.0099%) Students opt out of Madison’s Chromebooks

Erin Gretzinger

Just 44 students opted out of using Chromebooks last school year, according to district records obtained by the Cap Times under the state open records laws. This school year, that number jumped to 249 students — a 466% increase.

While the number of students opting out remains a fraction of the district’s more than 25,000 students, the uptick reflects a growing desire among some parents for the Madison Metropolitan School District to change its approach to technology use in classrooms.

“It’s my perception that districts or private schools that are on the cutting edge of this are cutting down on screen time for kids in schools, and I really hope that Madison will do something that will move more in that direction,” said Sarah Catalano, who declined a Chromebook for her kindergartner at Lapham Elementary. “This feels like the only way that I really have as a parent to voice my disapproval or send a message to the district of how I would want it to change.”

……

A Madison school district analysis of Chromebook activity this spring found students’ average screen time exceeded the district’s own recommended limits across all grade levels.

Analysis of Student Screen Time and Chromebook Integration. Please see the attached memo for the analysis of student screen time and Chromebook integration: Pages 72 – 75.

———

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

“Overfunded”

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

civics, lawfare + barfare: “Ninety-two of those filings were tied to the 2020 election”

Democracy Restored:

Today, Democracy Restored (DR) released a new report that exposes a secret, well-funded, and coordinated national campaign by the Left to target conservative attorneys with lawfare and barfare.

DR’s report, “‘Shame Them and Make Them Toxic’: The Left’s Campaign to Attack Its Political Opponents Using Lawfare and Barfare,” examines the organizations, political operatives, funding sources, and publicity strategies behind what Democracy Restored calls the “Lawfare Consortium.” Democracy Restored Senior Counsel Karin Sweigart presented the report Wednesday at “BARFARE: Stopping Bar Discipline as Political Warfare.”

The report connects hundreds of data points to expose the Lawfare Consortium’s key figures, targets, publicity tactics, geographic strategy, and funding sources. Spearheaded by The 65 Project, this network of Democrat-aligned activist organizations includes Hillary Clinton insider and Media Matters founder David Brock and former Obama “Ethics Czar” Norm Eisen. As Brock told once told reporters, their goal is not merely to file grievances against their targets, but to “shame them and make them toxic” in their communities and firms.

While cases involving John Eastman (disbarred), Cleta Mitchell (resigned from her law firm), Rudolph Giuliani (disbarred), Kenneth Chesebro (disbarred), and Jenna Ellis (suspended from the bar) have attracted national attention, DR’s investigation examines the secret machinery behind those headlines. Drawing on disciplinary records, court documents, nonprofit disclosures, and organizational publications, the report identifies a recurring strategy: file complaints, publicize accusations, amplify coverage, and use subsequent developments to renew pressure on attorneys and their employers.

Between 2016 and 2026, DR counted 181 bar complaints and related filings targeting 122 lawyers, five firms, and 44 non-lawyers across 34 jurisdictions in 26 states. Ninety-two of those filings were tied to the 2020 election.

——-

More.

Norm Eisen and his partners were behind having Trump affiliated attorneys disbarred. They are still at it to this day as they recently filed a complaint against Ed Martin.

KPMG case:

In Stein v. United States (2006), Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled that the U.S. government violated the Fifth and Sixth Amendments by coercing KPMG to withhold legal fees from its former partners and employees.

2026 American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey

North Dakota State Sheila and Robert Challey Institute for Global Innovation and Growth, PDF:

How the Culture War Put Public Schools at Risk

Richard D. Kahlenberg:

For more than half a century after Milton Friedman proposed using taxpayer money to support students in private schools, the libertarian economist’s idea went almost nowhere. Republican presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, pushed vouchers—which help parents enroll their children in schools of their choice, including private and religious schools, at taxpayer expense—as a way to liberate poor children from failing big-city school districts. Those efforts led to voucher initiatives in a smattering of districts, such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. But in state after state, support for public schools—which take all comers and have historically played a crucial role in cultivating students’ common identity as Americans—was just too broad-based and too strong to get voucherlike programs approved on a larger scale.

In the past several years, though, voucher advocates have switched strategies to take advantage of the country’s ever-deepening political polarization. In 2022, the Heritage Foundation urged the voucher movement “to embrace the culture war” as a way of promoting school choice. As evidence of progressive overreach, the conservative think tank has pointed to “racial essentialism for third graders” and decried the presence in some school libraries of Gender Queer, a graphic novel that “features a picture of oral sex being performed on a sex toy.”

Conservative leaders in many state capitals have emulated Heritage’s tactics, and the tactical shift has helped persuade lawmakers to expand the supply of school vouchers. Amy Sinclair, the president of the Iowa state Senate, told an interviewer in 2023 that during the coronavirus pandemic, “many parents became aware of anti-American and explicit materials in their child’s classrooms and began to demand choice.” “There’s no reason why any students should have a woke agenda pushed on them,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared a month later at a rally for private-school-choice legislation. The following year, his Arkansas counterpart, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, promoted her school-choice efforts by declaring on X, “We need kids learning math, reading, and science—not woke nonsense.” Since the pandemic, voucherlike programs have proliferated, and they are now open to even the richest students. In 2021, no states had universal programs supporting private education with public dollars; by 2025, 18 did. The number of students using publicly funded private-school-choice programs has tripled since the 2018–19 school year.

Notes and Perspective on k-12 tax & $pending efficiency

Bruce Baker:

In a new brief (full PDF here), I estimate a stochastic frontier model of district efficiency using the National Education Cost Model: roughly 129,000 district-years for about 8,100 districts in 38 states, 2009–2024. The frontier is the best outcome achievable at a given level of spending relative to cost. Each district’s efficiency is its distance from that frontier, expressed as the share of its current resources a fully efficient district would need to reach the same outcomes. I estimate it with and without state fixed effects, because (more on this below) comparing test scores across states is its own can of worms.

The headline findings:

Money matters, with diminishing returns. A 10 percent increase in resources relative to cost raises frontier outcomes by about 0.07 SD nationally, and about 0.09 SD when comparing districts within the same state. That’s not nothing. It’s a lot.
Most districts are about equally efficient. The median district operates at about 86 percent efficiency, and nearly three-quarters of district-years fall between 80 and 90 percent. There is a long lower tail, but there’s no evidence here of a system drowning in waste.
The tail has been growing, and it’s growing within states. The share of districts below 80 percent efficiency doubled, from 11 percent in 2011 to 22 percent in 2024, and the pattern is the same when districts are compared only with others in their own state.
The “bloated administration” story is tiny. Within their own states, the least efficient districts are more heavily staffed across the board, with more teachers, more aides and more administrators, and they are also smaller and higher-cost. The general administration gap between the most and least efficient districts works out to something like $80–100 per pupil. Anyone promising to close achievement gaps by trimming the central office is selling something.

Florida is efficient. New Jersey is better.

Rank states by average efficiency and you get Idaho, North Carolina, Utah, Florida and Georgia at the top, with Rhode Island, West Virginia, Connecticut, Wyoming and New Jersey at the bottom. Cue the triumphant op-ed about Florida.

———-

Commentary thread:

You are using a measure of “cost” that has your conlclusions baked in as an assumption! Very sneaky.

———

Overfunded”

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked.

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?

China’s PhD Glut Drives Top Graduates to High School Teaching Jobs

Commentary: Seventeen Years of Roza-Tinted Glasses

Bruce Baker: [more]

My critiques of Marguerite Roza, the Edunomics Lab, and Education Resource Strategies — with receipts. Every quotation is verbatim from the linked post or article.24

The short version

I’ve spent an embarrassing share of my career, seventeen years and counting, cleaning up after Marguerite Roza. It has come in two waves. The first ran from 2009 to 2014, when she was at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and then advising the Gates Foundation, and her work was all over the federal policy conversation. The second started in 2025, when the Edunomics Lab she now runs at Georgetown began handing state policymakers graphs so bad I made a video about them. Education Resource Strategies (ERS) comes up less often, but it keeps turning up in the same places. Its founder, Karen Hawley Miles, co-wrote the Houston/Cincinnati weighted student funding (WSF) “success story” with Roza. Stephen Frank presented ERS slides alongside Roza’s fabricated graph at the 2011 Regents symposium. And ERS graded Baltimore’s Fair Student Funding against Baltimore’s own formula.

It comes down to the same four problems, over and over:

——-

Overfunded”

Madison’s district, despite an elite university pipeline, hypereducated leadership, and a shiny, new strategic plan, suffers the same frailties as Milwaukee’s: basement performance, backbreaking spending. But while Milwaukee is pulling out of its tailspin due to courageous choices from the top, Madison is ponderously ambling to nowhere. Just ask the locals. “You need the marketing, and you need the product,” as a parent told a reporter. “I’m missing the product.”

2025-2026 Madison 4k-3rd grade Early Literacy Screener report: The bar moves faster than the kids.

Joe Gothard, Becky Kundert and Sonia Spencer Remarks on Madison’s K-12 Literacy Crisis.

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!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

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.

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.

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]