William Jeynes

There are two schools of thought regarding how best to eliminate the achievement gap. The first group calls on society to focus its attention on eliminating “opportunity gaps,” arguing that this will lead to higher academic achievement among currently disadvantaged students. These opportunity gaps include factors such as being a member of a racial minority, discrimination, poor nutrition, inadequate health care, not having access to high-quality public education, coming from a family in which the parents are poorly educated or do not speak English as their first language, and lack of internet and computer access.

A second group of scholars and community leaders is focused on reducing the “achievement gap.” They agree that addressing “opportunity gaps” must be part of the solution, but they caution that the causes of the achievement gap are complex. They go beyond the factors commonly identified as “opportunity gaps.” For example, this “achievement gap” group emphasizes that the personal decisions parents and children make regarding school have a considerable impact on the achievement gap. How involved will parents decide to become? How much will the household decideto emphasize faith in God, and the sense of purpose in life, and working hard to realize that purpose and please God, which normally follows?

Election Watch:

Not all Smurfs are Smurfs! A Smurf is an individual whose ID may have been used to launder money into political campaigns. Understand that Individuals listed herein should not be considered complicit and are more likely victims. Many contributors are ligitimate and until confirmed otherwise, should remain so. Click HERE and HERE for more information.

WILL:

Date & Time: Dec 18, 2024 12:00 PM in

Description

Join us for a virtual presentation hosted by the authors of a report on United States Supreme Court First Amendment cases that school board members should know. This session will feature both the perspective of an educator and policy expert focused on curriculum decisions, and a legal analysis to dive into some of the most famous Supreme Court cases that impact free speech and religious freedom in public schools. Attendees will also learn about emerging legal disputes over issues such as compelled speech, diversity training, and the balance between educators’ rights and district authority. Don’t miss this chance to equip yourself with knowledge to navigate contentious issues in K through 12 education governance and policymaking. Q&A to follow.

Duet Stroebel:

Publicly, @DrJillUnderly touts Act 20 as “landmark literacy legislation” and uses it as a campaign talking point.

Privately, she refers to literacy reform as “nonsense” and is actively trying to undermine the historic reading reforms behind the scenes.

Which is it, Jill?

Kyle Koenen:

DPI says that the dumbing down of standards happened “in a very open and transparent manner.” Yet, every participant had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. How is that transparent?

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Will Flanders:

This is incredible from @DrJillUnderly. Pointing out that DPI lowered standards, making it impossible for families to know how kids are doing & to assess COVID recovery isn’t “politicizing.” The politicization was in lowering the bar in the first place.

Quinton Klabon:

If DPI and Superintendent Underly genuinely need advice on how to help poor children learn, I know some people we could ask!

What works for poor kids works for all kids. Wraparound investments supplement rigorous instruction and standards. They do not replace them.

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John Jagler:

Nobody is buying this. Not parents. Not teachers. Not principals. Not superintendents. Not school board menders. Not even your governor.

——

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Martin Gurri:

There’s a radical dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo across the democratic world. The people in charge are distrusted and despised by the public: They are thought to be in business for themselves and indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people. From government agencies to the scientific establishment, the institutions that buttress modern society have been tainted by the corruption and poor performance of the ruling elites. The public has come to view these institutions as cash cows for the haves—and an oppressive machinery for bleeding the have-nots.

How truly democratic today’s democracies are has become an open question. Negative answers trouble the political life of many nations. Everywhere the traditional parties, creatures of a decaying consensus, are in the grip of disintegration. They are being replaced by sectarian war bands that challenge the very legitimacy of the system. The public has a vague notion of what it is for but knows with terrible clarity what it stands against. A spirit of negation has inspired massive street uprisings in the style of France’s Yellow Vests and Black Lives Matter here at home, as well as the election of unorthodox populists like Donald Trump.

I analyzed the causes of this upheaval in my 2014 book, “The Revolt of the Public.” In brief, I argued that institutional elites have failed to adapt to the vast flows of information of the digital age. They reside at the top of great hierarchies that tower uneasily over a flattened socioeconomic landscape—and they want nothing to change. They crave the eternal preservation of the 20th-century regime, in which they wielded unquestioned authority and had the power to conceal their dirty secrets. In pursuit of this ideal—fondly labeled “our democracy”—they have grown ever more reactionary and antidemocratic over the decades.

Natalie Wexler:

A connection with declining scores for kids?

It’s tempting to link the decline in adult scores to the parallel phenomenon in student scores—especially since the U.S. scores are all announced by the same federal education official, Peggy Carr, whose job requires coming up with new ways to describe depressing data.

Carr said the adult scores show there’s a “dwindling middle in the United States in terms of skills,” with “more adults clustered at the bottom”—just as with kids in both reading and math. On the 2023 adult tests, the US, along with Singapore, displayed the “largest skills inequalities in literacy and numeracy” among the countries that participated.

“Public education is non-partisan for a reason”—Jill Underly, at her State of Education Address (2023). https://t.co/BckLfiuUhE pic.twitter.com/NRftohKYsC

— Brooks (@EBrooksUncut) December 15, 2024

Daisy Christiodoulou

There are no solutions, only trade-offs

One of the arguments I make is that there are quite a few overlaps between the kind of decision-making needed in education and assessment, and that required by football referees.

One important concept that’s relevant to both is the idea of trade-offs. For years, before VAR was introduced, we would hear football fans and players complain about bad refereeing decisions. The phrase you’d hear a lot was “we just want more right decisions”, and that was the justification for introducing technological support to referees.
Except, of course, within just a few games of VAR’s introduction, we suddenly realised that whilst we wanted “more right decisions”, we wanted a lot of other things too, some of which we maybe hadn’t even realised were important. Rio Ferdinand put this well back in 2019, when he argued that VAR’s quest for more right decisions was compromising another crucially important part of football – its simplicity.

Morgan Polikoff and William Hughes

It’s been over four years since schools closed to stop the spread of COVID-19 and by now there is no question that the pandemic has a long shadow over Wisconsin education.

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam show Wisconsin students’ performance lags far behind historical peaks in the early to mid-2010s, and absenteeism data show about a 50% increase in chronic absenteeism since pre-COVID. Wisconsin also has cavernous, long-standing Black-white test score gaps, gaps that have not been narrowing.

There is a perhaps well-intentioned desire to move past the pandemic and its effects on children, but we still need urgency to get children back on track. And before this, there needs to be clarity about what the problems are — what effects COVID has had on Wisconsin’s schoolchildren, and how much work is needed to recover.

Bruce Mehlman:

REASONS FOR DOGE SKEPTICISM

1. Trends Are Getting Worse, Not Better. America’s government has grown nearly 50% faster than its economy this century. Federal debt has outpaced economic growth by nearly 3x. Deficits have grown under Republican & Democratic Presidents, Democratic & Republican Congresses.  Interest costs alone now exceed defense spending.  Neither voters nor bond vigilantes have demanded change so far. While Stein’s Law remains true — if something cannot go on forever it will stop — it might keep going for a long time.

REASONS FOR DOGE OPTIMISM

4. Many Solutions Are Already Proven.  A 2017 report from the Tech CEO Councilshowed how government could save $1.1 trillion over 10 years by adopting private-sector-proven best practices. President Trump embraced these findings last time and launched the Office of American Innovation in response. Recent innovations offer the DOGE team even more powerful solutions. 

“the real power of DOGE will be to put Congress on trial for its failure to do its job. Every wasteful program uncovered by DOGE will be a program that Congress funded this year.”

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more.

Pamela Snow:

There’s no such thing as a quiet year in education, but 2024 has been a notably non-quiet year, especially for reading instruction in the state of Victoria, Australia. On June 13, the Victorian Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, the Hon. Ben Carroll MP released a media statement signalling a new direction of travel for Victorian schools with respect to early years reading instruction. 

Specifically, the Department announced that it is mandating the use of 25 minutes of systematic synthetic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction in all Victorian classrooms, Foundation to Year 2, as of Term 1, 2025. I blogged back in June about the sustained advocacy by many, many stakeholders, over a number of years, that led to this historic announcement and again commend the Minister on this momentous and shape-shifting change in Victorian education. It has been refreshing and impressive in equal measure to see the quality of the work undertaken by the Department since the June announcement, culminating in the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0, high-quality lesson plans, discontinuation of the psychometrically weak English Online Interview, in favour of a robust and efficient Phonics Screening Check, and high-quality, accessible information for parents.

The usual colour and movement ensued from some quarters about this announcement. The Victorian Branch of the Australian Education Union immediately went into overdrive about Minister Carroll’s media release reflecting a lack of respect for teacher autonomy, and was critical of what was seen as a lack of consultation. I wonder if doctors and nurses who work in our public hospitals expect to be consulted via their unions on infection control protocols, or whether these are simply matters which policy makers, as consumers of evidence, should distil into knowledge-translation formats that ensure the best outcomes for end-users of the system, in that case, patients. It was disappointing that the education union made no reference to the needs of students.It missed an opportunity to be part of the education tipping point that could, over time, result in significant social justice benefits to all students, but most notably to those in equity groups who are constantly sold short when instruction is not of the highest and tightest possible calibre: students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, students from rural and regional areas, those from English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EALD) background, and/or those who have special education needs such as learning difficulties and other forms of neurodiversity that heighten, rather than diminish their need for high-quality instruction. Such students were a focus of the 2024 Grattan Institute Reading Guarantee Report authored by Jordana Hunter, Anika Stobart and Amy Haywood.

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“An emphasis on adult employment”.

Jennifer Pahlka

It’s far more likely that there is just a perplexing combination of legitimate and imagined reasons for caution, and review by a staggering array of stakeholders. As I talked about in my book, outsiders (and certainly the right) imagine dangerously concentrated power in the executive branch, and seek to limit it. The reality is shockingly diffuse power. The bad outcomes they are fighting to prevent — burdensome, overreaching government — are the product of exactly the conditions they help create. Neither the left nor the right really has the mental models (nor, perhaps the desire) to effectively challenge the status quo of the technocracy.

But I don’t want to dismiss the difficulty of confronting commercial interests. I think it’s fair to say that in the time I’ve been working on this issue we haven’t really seen the vendor ecosystem threatened in any meaningful way. The supplier base for government tech, for example, is not all that different from when I started Code for America in 2010. Anduril has made strides at the DoD for sure, and some startups have done some interesting stuff. Companies like Nava, a public benefit corporation whose costs and outcomes in contracting with agencies like CMS and VA should make it a strong choice across civilian government, is now over 500 people. But CGI Federal, just to pick one of the incumbents, is 90,000. Lockheed Martin is 122,000. Anduril is 3,500. It’s not like we’ve seen some massive shakeup.

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more

Nassim

Adam Ellwanger

Impact of 9/11: 9/11 caused a national trauma and a crisis of American confidence, particularly an identity crisis.

National Response: The attack led to the Global War on Terror, which divided Americans and weakened the nation.

Shift in National Perception: The war forced Americans to confront the possibility that they were not always the “good guys,” a concept not seriously considered since the Vietnam War.

Wirepoints:

“ai” summary

Ted discussed Illinois’ pension crisis, its impact on competitiveness, and the need for transparency.

Dom Fenoglio ,  Ranjan Jindal ,  Sophie Levenson and  Abby Spiller

Content warning: This article contains mentions of sexual assault and rape. 

Crystal Mangum, the woman who falsely accused three Duke men’s lacrosse players of rape in 2006, admitted she lied about the allegations and asked for David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann’s forgiveness.

Mangum made her confession in an interview published Wednesday on “Let’s Talk with Kat,” hosted by Katerena DePasquale, at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women. Unrelated to the lacrosse case, Mangum is currently in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder of her then-boyfriend in 2013.

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong, and I betrayed the trust of a lot of other people who believed in me,” Mangum said in the interview. “[I] made up a story that wasn’t true because I wanted validation from people and not from God.”

Then-N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper did not prosecute Mangum for perjury after the case was dismissed, saying at the time that the investigators thought “she may have actually believed the many different stories that she has been telling.” The statute of limitations on perjury charges typically lasts two years in North Carolina law, meaning that Mangum can no longer be prosecuted for lying under oath.

Duke Athletics declined The Chronicle’s request for comment on Mangum’s statement. University administration, former University President Richard Brodhead, then-head men’s lacrosse coach Mike Pressler and Seligmann did not respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment in time for publication.

Mangum’s statement comes nearly two decades after she asserted that she was raped by the lacrosse players. Until now, she had never publicly stated that it was not true. 

Thomas Catenacci

The climate nonprofit, formally known as the Energy Foundation but which dubs itself “Energy Foundation China,” wired grants to Harvard College, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Maryland to support research and education on building a “clean energy future” and advancing “low carbon cities.” The Energy Foundation gave a total of $630,000 to the four universities in 2023.  All four of those universities promote far-left climate policies.

The Energy Foundation also funneled another $1.5 million to the following left-wing climate nonprofits: the Rocky Mountain Institute, International Council on Clean Transportation, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, and Natural Resources Defense Council. Those groups all are dedicated to promoting the phase-out of fossil fuels and mass expansion of costly green energy alternatives.

Tressa Pankovits

“ai” summary:

Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) lowered achievement standards for the Forward exam, resulting in a significant increase in proficiency scores. This move raises concerns about the accuracy of standardized test scores in measuring student achievement.

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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dr. Darja Barr, Dr. Jim Clark, Dr. James Currie, Dr. Payman Eskandari, Dr. Shakhawat Hossain, Dr. Narad Rampersad, Dr. Anna Stokke, Dr. Ross Stokke and Dr. Matthew Wiersma:

“ai” summary:

A review of references cited by Dr. Martha Koch found no credible support for her claims that recent amendments to Manitoba’s Teaching Certificates and Qualifications Regulation are research-based. The review highlights methodological flaws and contradictory evidence in the cited articles, raising concerns about the potential influence of these claims on public policy.

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2007 math forum audio video 

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Remedial math

Madison’s most recent Math Task Force

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

Michael Zwaagstra:

Remember when Manitoba teachers were once forbidden from giving zeroes to students who didn’t hand in assignments? At that time, even docking marks for late work was strongly discouraged.

Unsurprisingly, this approach failed miserably. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could see that this policy resulted in students choosing not to hand in assignments on time. And yet, no-zero policies were overwhelmingly supported by education professors and school administrators.

The earlier NDP government in Manitoba initially made the mistake of listening to bad advice from education professors. Former education minister Peter Bjornson even went as far as publicly defending no-zero policies by explaining that “a zero is not an accurate indicator of what the student has learned or achieved.”

Fortunately, soon after making that silly claim, Bjornson was replaced by Nancy Allan. Unlike her predecessor, Allan discerned that it made no sense to defend the indefensible. In 2010, Allan wisely announced that teachers could once again use their professional discretion to give zeroes to students who failed to hand in assignments.

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More.

Fact-checking research claims about math education in Manitoba

——

2007 math forum audio video 

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Remedial math

Madison’s most recent Math Task Force

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

Kimberly Wethal:

UW-Madison is adding a business partnership floor to its upcoming engineering building. This initiative aims to establish a direct connection between students and potential employers.

The plan involves businesses renting space on the floor, providing them with easy access to student and researcher talent. Additionally, the floor will offer internships in businesses seeking engineering graduates.

The additional $29 million required to construct the floor comes from leftover state funds allocated to UW-Eau Claire’s new science and health building and a chilling and cooling tower replacement project. According to UW System capital planning and budget lead Alex Roe, the bids for the Eau Claire project significantly exceeded initial projections due to state statute requiring higher estimates during a period of rapid construction cost inflation.

Danielle DuClos:

Critics, including former Madison mayor Paul Soglin, urged residents to vote against the $22 million tax referendum before the November election. Soglin suggested using the rainy day fund to close the gap in 2025 while lobbying for more funds. He reiterated this call, stating last year’s surplus and this year’s could have averted the referendum through 2026.

Approximately 57% of Madison voters approved the referendum, with stronger support from central residents.

Schmiedicke emphasized the budgetary benefits of using manageable amounts of rainy day funds annually rather than a large lump sum.

Charles Sykes:

America is again facing an educational crisis. Last week, The New York Times reported that American students “turned in grim results on the latest international test of math skills.” That test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), found that fourth graders have dropped 18 points in math since 2019, while eighth graders have dropped 27 points. The math scores of both high-performing and low-performing eighth graders fell. As the education reporter Dana Goldstein notes, the coronavirus pandemic is a major contributor to the decline, but not the only one: “In the United States, academic declines—and widening gaps between stronger and weaker students—were apparent before the pandemic,” she writes. In 2019, the National Assessment of Educational Progress found that two-thirds of American children could not read at a proficient level.

——

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

The @nytimes is at it again, defaming the next @NIH director @DrJBhattacharya.

We urge them to correct their false claims in this letter together with Drs. @Bryce_Nickels, @anish_koka & @kevinnbass. pic.twitter.com/Hn2pUQyTrt

— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) December 13, 2024

Robert Pondiscio:

Does any field have a weaker grasp of its own history than education?

Last week, I hosted a discussion at the American Enterprise Institute on “Bringing High Expectations Back to Education.” The event, which can be viewed on YouTube, was kicked off by a presentation by Steven Wilson, an ed reform fixture who has a book coming out on the subject. Listening to his talk, I found myself feeling frustrated, even infuriated: Efforts to raise rigor and expectations in education have consistently faced strident opposition.

Wilson cited a litany of disheartening examples stretching back more than a century of education experts making a virtue of holding children to low expectations for their putative benefit: When the “Committee of Ten” appointed by the National Education Association in 1892 proposed a liberal arts education for all American high school students, for example, G. Stanley Hall, a prominent psychologist and educator rejected the idea, claiming most students were part of a “great army of incapables.” Half a century later, the “life adjustment” education movement of the 1940s, asserted that the majority of high school students were not college-bound and should therefore focus on practical skills like health and hygiene, homemaking, or vocational training, rather than rigorous academics.

The Economist:

Does it often feel as if the world is getting stupider? Data released on December 10th by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, suggest this may not be all in your head. Roughly every ten years the organisation asks adults in dozens of places to sit tests in numeracy and literacy. The questions it poses are not abstract brainteasers, spelling tests or mental arithmetic. They aim to mimic problems people aged 16-65 face in daily life, whether they are working in a factory or an office, or simply trying to make sense of the news.

The latest tests were carried out in 31 rich countries, and their findings are unnerving. They suggest that a fifth of adults do no better in maths and reading than might be expected of a primary-school child. The direction of travel is even less encouraging. In maths, average scores have risen in a few places over the past ten years, but fallen in almost as many. In literacy, a lot more countries have seen scores decline than advance, despite the fact that adults hold more and higher educational qualifications than ever before.

Miles Kruppa:

Record labels have the Billboard Hot 100. College football has its playoff rankings. Artificial intelligence has a website, run by two university students, called Chatbot Arena.

Roommates Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang never imagined the graduate school project they developed last year would quickly become the most-watched ranking of the world’s best AI systems.

Traditionally, AI technologies have been assessed through advanced math, science and law tests. Chatbot Arena lets users ask a question, get answers from two anonymous AI models and rate which one is better.

The ratings are aggregated onto a leaderboard where big Silicon Valley players like OpenAI, Google and Meta Platforms vie for supremacy with lesser-known startups from China and Europe.

“Everyone is striving to be at the top of this leaderboard,” said Joseph Spisak, a director of product management at Meta Platforms working on AI. “It’s amazing to have a few students get together and be able to create that level of impact.”

IRG Senior Research Director Quinton Klabon:

The Joint Committee on Finance was forced to dispute the actions of the Department of Public Instruction once again on critical Act 20 reading reforms. The Institute for Reforming Government calls for DPI to follow the law as written so Wisconsin can catch up to leading literacy states.

What Happened: In approving recent curriculum submissions from the Early Literacy Curriculum Council, DPI argued it has no legal obligation to follow the process described in Act 20. Instead of JFC having final say, DPI argued it does. JFC quickly reasserted its standing.

Despite regularly picking fights on literacy, DPI lacks a track record of success to justify its quarrelsomeness. The left-leaning Urban Institute recently ranked Wisconsin 28th in reading performance nationally, adjusted for demographics.
Why It Matters: This is just the latest example of DPI destabilizing the bipartisan Act 20.

DPI tried to replace a widely praised curriculum list chosen by ELCC with its own list of mediocre materials. National reading advocates criticized the attempt, and JFC reverted back to ELCC’s original recommendations.

DPI misinterpreted a clear legal deadline of July 1, 2025, for teachers to complete reading retraining, delaying any student improvement until 2026. DPI made clear it understood the law’s intended deadline, but still advises schools to complete training after July 1.

DPI appointed Barb Novak to be the current Office of Literacy Director, despite her being the former President of the Wisconsin State Reading Association. WSRA is a balanced-literacy-supporting group that lobbied against Act 20.

DPI has done a media tour to justify squandering millions of the $50 million in literacy funding on reading coaches that serve no purpose before curriculum replacement and retraining are complete.

Superintendent Underly appeared to criticize Act 20 in private, writing in a June 2023 email, “And with all this other nonsense going on with literacy I want to make sure we’re not throwing more fuel onto this fire.”

The Quote: “Decades of DPI leadership on literacy have given Wisconsin the worst results for Black students in America and mediocrity everywhere else,” said CJ Szafir, IRG CEO. “DPI should follow Act 20 to the letter because it copies states that have solved the reading crisis.”

What’s Next: Act 20 funding and policy will be a key facet of the 2025 budget debate. IRG will ensure parents, journalists, and policymakers understand what is at stake.

WisPolitics:

The Department of Public Instruction has adopted reading curriculum recommendations without seeking approval from the Joint Finance Committee, according to a letter shared with WisPolitics.

The move comes after the state Supreme Court in a 6-1 decision overturned the process the GOP-controlled Legislature has used to block stewardship purchases through JFC, ruling it violates the separation of powers.

Superintendent Jill Underly on Friday sent a letter to GOP co-chairs Sen. Howard Marklein and Rep. Mark Born informing them of the recommendations, adding: “following the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision in Evers v. Marklein, the DPI will not submit this curricula list to the Joint Committee on Finance for review or approval.”

She noted the high court’s affirmation that “Once the legislature passes a bill that is signed by the governor and becomes law, ‘the legislature plays no part in enforcing our statutes.’”

The recommendations are part of the state’s new literacy law, which requires a phonics-based approach to literacy. Schools that use the materials are eligible for reimbursements to cover half the cost. But JFC has declined to approve the $50 million set aside to fund new literacy initiatives under the law. Gov. Tony Evers and the Legislature are currently involved in litigation over the funding.

The resources recommended by the Early Literacy Curricula Council include:

Bookworms Reading and Writing K-3 (Open Up Resources, 2022)
Core Knowledge Language Arts K-3 (CKLA, Amplify Education, 2022)
EL Education K-3 Language Arts (Open Up Resources, 2017)
HMH Into Reading with Amira (HMH, 2023)
Wit and Wisdom with Geodes (Great Minds, 2023) and FundationsÆ (Wilson Language TrainingÆ, 2020)
Wit and Wisdom with Geodes (Great Minds, 2023) and Really Great Reading (Countdown 2017, Blast Foundations 2014, HD Word 2015)
The recommendations come after DPI and JFC in March clashed over what materials to approve.

Letter (December 6, 2024) to the Wisconsin Joint Finance Committee from DPI Superintendent Jill Underly.

December 10, 2024 JFC response.

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more.

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The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Michael Lind:

Like other forms of inflation, degree inflation reduces the inflated unit of currency. Today a worker earning between $40,000 and $60,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars is as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as a worker in 2006 who earned between $60,000 and $80,000, when there were fewer college graduates as a share of the workforce. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP): “Between 1990 and 2021, all occupational categories except one—teachers and librarians—experienced degree inflation, meaning the proportion of prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree increased.”

There is no reason to believe that receptionists and bank tellers with B.A.s in popular majors like communications or business, to say nothing of gender studies, are more productive and skilled than their non-college-educated predecessors who had high school educations plus on-the-job training. According to a surveyof employers by Bloomberg, college diplomas are most often used as a screening device for entry-level job applicants, rather than as evidence that the potential hires have job-relevant skills: “For more than half of employers surveyed (60 percent), a college diploma was seen as a stand-in for work ethic, personal skills and mental capacity, as opposed to the actual skills associated with the job.”

Kayla Huynh:

“What sets me apart is being able to analyze data and derive meaningful conclusions from it. That is what I do day in and day out in my profession,” Wagner said. “We need a better framework for reviewing policy and programming so that we can be confident that the things we will need to subtract or remove (from the budget) are the right things, and we’re still left with an overall strong school district.”

His other priorities include reducing administrative burdens on teachers, implementing public performance dashboards, providing oversight of the $607 million in referendum money, and supporting universal access to school meals and mental health services. Wagner said he would also advocate for better compensation packages and professional development for teachers. 

Two other School Board seats will be on the April ballot, including Seats 4 and 5. Nichelle Nichols, the board’s current president, will run for reelection to Seat 4. Ali Muldrow is seeking a third term in Seat 5. 

——

November 7, 2024 latest budget including the (passed) fall referendums. Total spending: $608,824,795 for 26,310 students or $23,140 each.

——

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

kendall Keys:

Palmer’s property taxes rose 30.5% from last year’s $3,600 bill. 

“Right now, it’s just here’s this gap, you know, deal with it,” Palmer said. 

He owes the city more than $1,100 to make up for what his escrow didn’t cover.

“I’m lucky in that I have the money I can cover this with. But a lot of people don’t. People who are retired, living on fixed incomes, again, people who are renting,” Palmer said. “Money doesn’t just fall out of the sky. Where is this supposed to come from at the end of the year when other taxes are due, and we have the holidays and everything else?” 

Palmer said his monthly mortgage will go up about $100 a month next year, on top of the lump sum he now owes. 

“And that’s without the referendum we voted for. So, we’re going to get hit again next year,” Palmer said.

——

more.

Joel Kotkin:

The Western world has many enemies – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – but none is more potentially lethal than its own education system. From the very institutions once renowned for spreading literacy, the Enlightenment and the means of mastering nature, we now see a deep-seated denial of our common past, pervasive illiteracy and enforced orthodoxy.

The decay of higher education threatens both the civic health and long-term economic prospects of Western liberal civilisation. Once a font of dispassionate research and reasoned discussion, the academy in recent years has more resembled that of the medieval University of Paris, where witch trials were once conducted, except there is now less exposure to the canon.

American universities face an unprecedented challenge with the return of Donald Trump. His administration seems likely to attack such things as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, while pushing to defund programmes favourable to terrorists, expel unruly students and deport those who are in the US illegally. Loss of federal support to universities, the educrats fear, could cause major financial setbacks, even among the Ivies. Like medieval clerics, the rapidly growing ranks of university administrators, deans and tenured faculty have grown used to living in what one writerdescribes as a ‘modern form of manorialism’, where luxury and leisure come as of right.

Vox Popoli

Even at the end of his very undistinguished career, Krugman cannot admit that he and his fellow ethnic elites completely blew the opportunity that their grandfathers and fathers so painstakingly prepared for them. They assumed near-complete control of the most powerful empire the world has ever seen at a time when the rest of the world was still digging itself out of the rubble of WWII, and instead of devoting themselves to the benefit of the American people, spent the last fifty years looting their host nation and abusing their power and their influence in a manner so obviously stupid and short-lived that it’s hard to even describe it as self-serving.

The reason people around the world have lost all faith in elites is the direct result of the complete failure by Krugman and his fellow elitists to govern reasonably, let alone responsibly. Their core assumptions were wrong, their objectives were insane, their policies were societally destructive, and their eventual failure was inevitable.

It’s not so much that Paul Krugman will not be missed. He will not even be remembered.

Nusaiba Mizan

Houston ISD’s Board of Managers approved December budget amendments on Tuesday to allocate more money to instruction, campus maintenance and operations, and student transportation, despite an enrollment decline of nearly double what was anticipated.

Budget expenditures for this fiscal year increased by $125.5 million, which State-appointed Superintendent Mike Miles attributed in part to a $57 million recapture payment to the state — coded as Contracted Instructional Services Between Public Schools in the budget amendment. 

HISD leaders said Tuesday that enrollment is unofficially at 175,644 students. HISD had expected to drop by about 4,000, but its enrollment slipped by 7,600. Enrollment has been in a freefall since 2019-20, when HISD had nearly 210,000 students. The district’s official enrollment figure, as reported to the Texas Education Agency in October, isn’t expected to be released publicly until January.

OECD:

The latest Survey of Adult Skills highlights a mixed global picture of literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem solving proficiency. Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden excel in all these areas, with significant proportions of their adult populations demonstrating advanced abilities. However, on average across OECD countries, 18% of adults do not even have the most basic levels of proficiency in any of the domains.

Thirty-one countries and economies participated in the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills. The survey, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), provides a comprehensive overview of adults’ literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem solving skills – skills that are fundamental for personal, economic, and societal development.

Richard Willingham

Victorian state school grade one students will sit a new 10-minute literacy assessment under the state’s move to phonics teaching for reading, which experts say will improve early intervention for struggling kids.

Phonics — explicit literacy teaching focusing on the sounds in words — is being introduced into the Victorian curriculum despite resistance from the Australian Education Union.

Experts and the state government say the teaching method will improve results.

“Phonics, at heart, is basically just teaching children the letter sound relationships and it helps them to decode unfamiliar words,” Jordana Hunter from the Grattan Institute said.

Quinton Klabon:

Oh, BROTHER.
The Wisconsin Education Department ruled Reading Recovery is not banned under science of reading laws and gave De Pere a cookie for having to justify its use.
We are a Stone Age state.
@kymyona_burk @ehanford @karenvaites @KJWinEducation @MichaelPetrilli @rpondiscio

——

Nadia Scharf:

Niffenegger’s complaint stated that the district was using unapproved curriculum and “three-cueing,” a teaching strategy that uses context, structure and letters to identify words. Novak said in the letter that Act 20 doesn’t require the use of approved curriculum, and that De Pere’s curriculum is cohesive and “exceeds the requirements” of state statute. The letter also said the district demonstrated it does not use three-cueing

The complaint also stated that the district “(lets) teachers do that they think is best.” The letter stated that teachers stick to explicit curriculum, but they support their teachers in using “their professional knowledge and judgement” to help students learn to read by third grade.

What did the DPI look at in making its decision?

De Pere submitted hundreds of pages of information on its literacy instruction, including how it adapted its curriculum to fit Act 20 when the law was passed, how it uses the Reading Recovery program and what interventions look like in the district.

——

As schools around the country are dropping Reading Recovery, the nonprofit that advocates for the tutoring program tapped into its cash reserves to push back against journalists and legislators.

Sara Gabler:

$51 million dollars. That’s how much money the UW System paid Chicago-based Huron Consulting Group between 2019 and 2023.

Neil Kraus says that number is “astronomical.” Kraus is a professor of political science at UW-River Falls and President of United Falcons, the campus branch of AFT-Wisconsin. He tracks the Universities of Wisconsin budget cuts, technology spending, and austerity measures.

He co-wrote a piece with Jon Shelton for the Cap Times about technology spending. 

“I cited a number, just on one software–EAB’s Navigate–which is a huge priority for the UW, [that was] over $20 million. And I thought that was a lot. It is a lot. So your number is astronomical and game changing. Wow,” Kraus says.

But first let me backup and describe how WORT learned about Huron’s contracts with the UW Syste

——-

More.

Jenny Warner

Does get your mouth ready or word parts sound like teaching with a science based method? Do better DPI @WisconsinDPI dpi.wi.gov/sites/default/…

educhatter

For a country that once prided itself on being a “world class” superpower in education, the latest math scores on an International Education Association (IEA) test were met with total shock and a deafening silence. Our national education agency, the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (CMEC) and all provincial ministries of education looked the other way. Guessing at responses and thinking ‘outside the box’ now takes priority over getting the right answers in the highest levels of Canadian K-12 education.

A week ago, December 4, 2024, Canada’s grade four students plunged in math scores to 32^nd out of 64 countries who took the best-known international benchmark test in mathematics and science.  For the first time over the past 25 years, Canadian students fared worse than those in the United States (24^th) and those of Ontario fell below the country’s mean score.

Post-Pandemic Plunge – A Canadian ‘Sputnik Moment’?

More.

Ann Althouse Summary

I was especially interested in this because I was just listening to Jon Stewart talking to Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, a candidate for national chair, and he stressed building “an infrastructure” and “door-to-door organizing” (“We build neighborhood teams so neighbors are knocking on their neighbor’s door so that it’s someone that you actually know”). But Andreessen said, without pausing: “It has to be candidate recruitment. Like you, you gotta get to work in candidate recruitment.” Yeah, give us better people! I don’t need you knocking on my door.

Indeed. The knocking on doors has become rather crazy in Madison. Most answer that they are paid, some by the NEA others by the SEIU and still others who decided to drive to Wisconsin since their state is “not competitive”. My favorite door knock in 2024: “can the democrat party count on your support in elections this year…..”

Candidates, Candidates, Candidates, for sure!!

Sunlight Policy Center of New Jersey:

The NJEA justifies its highest-in-the-nation dues by touting higher salaries for NJ teachers. But, wait a second! The data in Sunlight’s newest report shows that once taxes and cost of living are accounted for, NJ teachers actually have lower salaries than states like Georgia and Texas.

FACT: NJ teachers are actually being underpaid compared to other states.

Don’t be fooled NJ teachers! The NJEA is not benefiting you nearly as much as they claim.

Perry Link:

The committee’s unofficial diversity, equity and inclusion guardian, Heidi Brevik-Zender, had proposed that we boost this black applicant ahead of several others and place him on our shortlist. My comments came in response to this boosting. Someone then reported them to deans and vice provosts without notice to me, triggering a university discipline machine that couldn’t be stopped.

Andrew Gregory:

Puberty blockers for under-18s with gender dysphoria will be banned indefinitely across the UK except for use in clinical trials, Labour has announced.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, said that after receiving advice from medical experts, he would make existing emergency measures banning the sale and supply of puberty blockers indefinite.

The Department of Health and Social Care said the Commission on Human Medicines (CHM) had published independent expert advice that there was “currently an unacceptable safety risk in the continued prescription of puberty blockers to children”.

Streeting said the commission had recommended indefinite restrictions while work is done to ensure the safety of children and young people.

The NHS announced in March that children would no longer be prescribed puberty blockersat gender identity clinics, with the then Conservative government saying this would help ensure care was based on evidence and was in the “best interests of the child”.

Musa al-Gharbi

Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.

Critically Speaking:

In this episode, Therese Markow and Dr. Anna Stokke discuss the decline in math education, noting that students lack basic arithmetic skills, hindering their ability to grasp complex concepts across multiple subjects. Dr. Stokke highlights the persistence of ineffective teaching methods, such as constructivism, despite evidence supporting direct instruction. She advocates for a return to systematic, explicit teaching methods to build a strong foundation in math. They also stress the importance of parents questioning educational practices and seeking evidence-based research. 
 Key Takeaways:

Elad Vaida

Harrison and his colleagues in the legislature wrote a letter on Nov. 21 to the University of Texas leadership that he shared on X. The legislators stated they were “extremely troubled” by the University of Texas’s decision to broaden eligibility for the Promise Plus program by accepting applicants “whose families earn up to $100,000.” 

The letter asked if the expansion “will apply to students who are enrolled in the ‘LGBTQ/Sexualities Studies’ Minor,” and if it will force “a working class Texan, who did not attend a college or university and is making $45k/year,” to “ [subsidize] the child of a parent who makes $100k/year?”

In his X statement, Harrison wrote that “nothing is free,” and called the expansion an “outrageous abuse of power.” He continued, calling on the Texas legislature to “stop this Nancy Pelosi-esque, regressive, welfare-for-the-rich program that abuses working class Texans by forcing them to fund ‘free’ college for ‘LGBTQ Studies’ students.”

Robin Hanson:

During my graduate studies (’93-97), I looked at the history of prizes in science. I learned that from ~1600-1800, prizes funded science lots, and much more than did grants. But ~1830, science elites controlling top scientific societies in both Britain and France defrauded donors to switch funding to grants, which were then directed by society insiders to be given mostly to insiders. Thereafter such societies insisted that donors must fund grants, not prizes, if they wanted their donations to gain prestigious scientific society associations.

Later, ~1900, tenure became common in academia. Then ~1940, peer review became common in publications, and ~1960 in grants. Also about midcentury, journalism switched from its usual mode of questioning and investigating claims made to it, to accepting whatever academics said and trying to “communicate” that to the public. In ~1980s, college rating systems became widely available to the US public, ratings which depended mainly how how elite academics rated those colleges.

All of these changes were ways in which academic elites wrested control of academia from outsiders who previously imposed some degree of incentives and accountability. The elites of most any profession would love to fully control it, being given resources to spend at their discretion, with little need to accommodate demands of customers, investors, regulators, or anyone else. But academic managed to achieve this ideal far more than most, due to its peak prestige. Via elite schools, academics control prestige in many other areas of life.

I review this history to make clear just what academic reformers are up against. It is far from sufficient to enumerate academic failures; you’ll have to develop concrete alternatives that can win prestige fights against the usual academics. History has long been moving against you; you’ll have to somehow reverse that strong tide.

CATO

all Americans must confront three uncomfortable truths:

1. The federal government often fails to deliver on its objectives, even those few constitutionally enumerated legitimate functions, while weighing down the economy with regulations that prevent market and nongovernmental actors from addressing major social and economic problems.
2. US economic growth, while stronger than much of the rest of the developed world, has been significantly lower in the past 25 years than the quarter-century beforehand, reducing American living standards below what they could have been.
3. Government debt, already historically high, is set to explode to unprecedented levels on policy autopilot over the next three decades, risking some combination of high inflation, slower growth, and federal default.

These three challenges were either worsened or created by the growth and metastasis of an unwieldy federal government and its associated administrative state. The government tries to do too much, so it overspends and overregulates the private sector. The federal government tries to be all things to all Americans—regulator, taxman, protector of individual rights, and Santa Claus—and ends up fulfilling very few of its roles, at a catastrophic cost to the life, liberty, private property, and prosperity of Americans.

More.

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Andrew Mark Miller:

Attorneys for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty argue on behalf of their client Mrs. Colbey Decker that a “troubling” and “unlawful” policy in the Green Bay Area School District “explicitly prioritizes reading support resources based on race, thereby violating the U.S. Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” according to a letter obtained by Fox News Digital.

“Mrs. Decker’s child, who suffers from dyslexia, has received different (and less favorable) services because he is white,” the letter states. “If he was Black, Hispanic, or Native American, Mrs. Decker’s son would have been treated more favorably and received different services.”

Decker told Fox News Digital that her son had been receiving one-on-one reading services in another district and that she assumed he would continue receiving that when he moved into the current district in January 2024 but that he was waitlisted for that additional help. 

more.

Julia Angwin:

Journalism is facing a trust crisis. Audiences are increasingly skeptical that mainstream media serves their interests and are turning their attention away from traditional news outlets. Meanwhile, online content creators who engage in journalist-style work are building huge, loyal audiences that eclipse those of traditional media.

This shift in attention can be attributed, in part, to the different types of relationships that journalists and creators have with their audiences. This paper examines these relationships through the lens of trustworthiness. The paper considers three key elements — ability, benevolence, and integrity — that must be present for trust to exist in a relationship.

What we find is that individual creators often work hard to demonstrate ability, benevolence, and integrity to build trust with their audiences. They narrate their expertise, respond to reader questions or suggestions, and interact with their critics — all tactics that help build trust.

News institutions have put less effort into building trustworthy relationships with audiences, and journalists at large institutions do not always have the license to engage independently with audiences in ways that could increase trust. In addition, journalists’ interests are not always aligned with their employers, and they sometimes have a hard time overcoming the trust issues that audiences have with their employers.

This does not mean that journalists are inherently less trustworthy. In fact, you could make a strong case that journalists are more trustworthy because of institutional guardrails, but those guardrails are often internal processes that are not exposed to the public. Meanwhile, creators who often have fewer internal guardrails have built more external-facing practices that help establish trust.

Jill Barshay:

So why do more than half of U.S. high schools offer calculus and why do so many students choose to take it? Many critics point their fingers at college admissions. A new survey of more than 130 college admissions officers, released Dec. 9, demonstrates how calculus has become a proxy for academic rigor. Even though 95 percent of the respondents agree that calculus isn’t necessary for all students, 74 percent put the College Board’s Advanced Placement calculus course among the top four math courses that carry the most weight. Almost a third of respondents said calculus gives a student an edge in admissions. Eighty-nine percent believe high schoolers who take calculus are more likely to succeed in college. Meanwhile, newer math courses are not seen as rigorous; 62 percent of respondents say that calculus is more rigorous than courses such as data science and statistics.

Henry Thompson:

I argue that generative AI will have an uneven effect on the evolution of the law. To do so, I consider generative AI as a labor-augmenting technology that reduces the cost of both writing more complete contracts and litigating in court. The contracting effect reduces the demand for court services by making contracts more complete. The litigation effect, by contrast, increases the demand for court services by a) making contracts less complete and b) reducing litigants’ incentive to settle, all else equal.

Where contracts are common, as in property and contract law, the change in the quantity of litigation is uncertain due to offsetting contracting and litigation effects. However, in areas where contracts are rare, as in tort law, the amount of litigation is likely to rise. Following Rubin (1977) and Priest (1977), generative AI will accelerate the evolution of tort law toward efficiency.

Andy Pierrotti

For the past 30 years, Georgia State University has run a program for experienced teachers to learn a curriculum called, Reading Recovery, which is intended to help children learn how to read.

Reading Recovery is one-on-one instruction in the classroom for the lowest performing students in first grade struggling to read. School districts in Georgia and across the country used its teaching methods for decades.

Once hailed as one of the most effective intervention models, a study published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness in 2023 raises questions about its effectiveness. While the results show the short-term impact to students “largely positive,” researchers say the results completely flipped once the children reach third and fourth grade.

“The Reading Recovery kids were actually worse off. There was a negative impact of Reading Recovery,” said Henry May, a professor at the University of Delaware who led the study. May also runs the Center for Research Use in Education.

Reading Recovery Council of North America asked the professor to the conduct the study, which tracked thousands of students in multiple states over 13 years. It’s the largest study of the program ever conducted.

——-

more.

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

ACT 20 READING UPDATE
@wispolitics had this letter from Superintendent Underly to the Legislature.

Good news: DPI recommended what ELCC did (HMH: ugh), no additions.

Bad news: DPI says rulings say they decide curriculum, not JFC.

News: DPI criticizes Act 20 funding conflict.

——

Much more on the Wisconsin DPI’s ongoing rigor reduction campaign.

——

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Paul Vallas:

Even if the CTU accepts the school districts contract counter offer, it will cost taxpayers over $3 billion over four years guaranteeing property tax increases each year to their state limit.

Barely half the schools $10 billion budget currently finds its way to the schools. The other $5 billion goes to fund the massive bureaucracy, bloated administrative staff and debt.

While district already spends over $30,000 per student, barely half is actually spent on instruction and half the district’s full time employees (over 22,000) are not teaching.

Despite 10% enrollment loss and closing schools 78 straight weeks, district added 9,000+ positions since 2019. Yet, only 13% were teachers.

By contrast, despite well over 50% increase in “reported” violent crime (2019-2024), the city eliminated over 2,100 public safety positions including 1,700 police officers.

Wisconsin public policy, forum:

The rise in gross levies this year is driven primarily by increases to K-12 property taxes — the largest local property tax most residents will pay. The $325 increase to per pupil revenue limits in the current state budget is one factor, but so was the willingness of many referendum voters to accept higher property taxes to fund their public schools.

Abbey Machtig summary:

The Madison School District’s $607 million pair of referendums — the largest school funding request put to voters in 2024 — are contributing to the growth. District officials estimate school property taxes will increase by $41 on this year’s bill, and by $1,370 by 2028, for owners of an average Madison home.

——-

no mention of the rapid increase in our tax base which should lead to lower taxes overall for some period of time….

Madison’s assessor:

Locally assessed real estate increased 9.3% for 2024. Commercial assessments increased 10.5% ($15,584 to $17,223 million) and residential assessments increased 8.5% ($25,826 to $28,021 million). Steady growth and continued development contributed to the increase

——-

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Arnold Kling:

My emphasis. I think that many people in the nonprofit sector, in corporate HR, in K-12 education, and especially in campus administration, have too high an opinion of their intellectual and moral superiority.
During my brief and unhappy experience as an adjunct economics professor at George Mason, I assigned students short essays, and a portion of the grade was on the quality of their writing. One student complained about the poor grade I had assigned to her on writing, so I proceeded to go over her essay with a red pen and highlight its flaws. It was soon covered in red. Meanwhile, she whined, “But I’ve always been told I’m a good writer.”

Exactly. These midwits have always been told that they are great, but they are not. And that is a somewhat different notion of “surplus elite” than what Turchin seems to be offering.

What we have in surplus are social justice activists.

Ellen Barry:

Millions of American schoolchildren — close to one-half, according to some industry estimates — are now subject to this kind of surveillance, whose details are disclosed to parents in a yearly technology agreement. Most systems flag keywords or phrases, using algorithms or human review to determine which ones are serious. During the day, students may be pulled out of class and screened; outside school hours, if parents cannot be reached by phone, law enforcement officers may visit students’ homes to check on them.

Casey Newton:

At the end of last month, I attended an inaugural conference in Berkeley named the Curve. The idea was to bring together engineers at big tech companies, independent safety researchers, academics, nonprofit leaders, and people who have worked in government to discuss the biggest questions of the day in artificial intelligence:

Does AI pose an existential threat? How should we weigh the risks and benefits of open weights? When, if ever, should AI be regulated? How? Should AI development be slowed down or accelerated? Should AI be handled as an issue of national security? When should we expect AGI?

If the idea was to produce thoughtful collisions between e/accs and decels, the Curve came up a bit short: the conference was long on existential dread, and I don’t think I heard anyone say that AI development should speed up. 

If it felt a bit one-sided, though, I still found the conference to be highly useful. Aside from all the things I learned about the state of AI development and the various efforts to align it with human interests, my biggest takeaway is that there is an enormous disconnect between external critics of AI, who post about it on social networks and in their newsletters, and internal critics of AI — people who work on it directly, either for companies like OpenAI or Anthropic or researchers who study it. 

David Blaska

X no longer marks the spot
Dane County bans its employees from using X, Elon Musk’s on-line social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Newly elected Dane County Executive Melissa Agard now “encourages” county employees to conduct their on-line social messaging on a new service called “Bluesky.” In so doing, the county exec joins the likes of Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, Barbra Streisand, and NPR in leaving X and/or taking up Bluesky.

Miles Kruppa

Record labels have the Billboard Hot 100. College football has its playoff rankings. Artificial intelligence has a website, run by two university students, called Chatbot Arena. 

Roommates Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang never imagined the graduate school project they developed last year would quickly become the most-watched ranking of the world’s best AI systems.

Sarah Libby and Michael Barabra

One day after the Supreme Court heard arguments over states’ ability to ban gender-affirming care for minors, a 20-year-old UCLA student sued two California doctors, saying they inappropriately rushed her “down a life-altering … and irreversibly damaging” gender transition beginning at age 12.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday by Kaya Clementine Breen in Los Angeles County Superior Court, argues that Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who runs the largest transgender youth clinic in the U.S. as the medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, diagnosed Breen with gender dysmorphia “mere minutes” into their first appointment, just after Breen had turned 12.

Riva:

Constructed upon a speech given by RMT. This film was produced by the Praxis team, in collaboration with RMT.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

It’s been the go-to tax in Illinois for decades. Property tax bills have been rising far faster than incomes for at least three decades, as we recently testified to a House Revenue and Finance Committee, and that’s left Illinoisans trapped paying the highest property tax rates in the nation. Those high taxes are a big contributor to Illinois’ continuing dysfunction, and yet politicians do nothing about it.

For a long time, the pain was felt more outside Chicago than in the city. Mayor Richard M. Daley knew to avoid the hated property tax, so he favored all kinds of other taxes and fees – a nickel and dime approach – to fund the city. But beginning with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, property taxes in the last decade have grown a whopping 3.5 times more than inflation. And that’s got Chicagoans livid and most aldermen finally pushing back.

Property taxes raised by the city proper, now totaling nearly $1.8 billion, are up 105% from 2014 to 2024. Chicago Public Schools has raised property taxes for itself by 74% in the decade. They totaled more than 3.7 billion in 2024.

——

follow-up:

The median value of a home in Chicago has only grown 30% since 2010 – the lowest by far among the nation’s 15 biggest cities according to U.S. Census data (2010 is the earliest year available from the Census ACS). That’s not even enough to keep up with inflation, which was up 40% over the same period.

more.

and:

When you receive your property tax bill this month, please remember it was Governor Evers who used his line item veto to create a 400 year guaranteed property tax increase.

The @WIAssemblyGOP understands that inflation and rising prices are hurting families. We pledge to return the surplus to your family. We will not use it to grow the size of government or create new welfare programs. #returnthesurplus

Corrinne Hess

Changes to UW-Madison’s School of Education math requirements

Steffen Lempp, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says over the last decade, the School of Education has changed how prospective K-8 teachers are taught math content to fully prepare them to teach children in the subject. 

The UW-Madison math department used to teach these math content courses. Those courses are now taught by the School of Education, in classes that blend content and pedagogy in one. Lempp feels that short-changes the math content preparation, especially for those teaching math in upper elementary and middle school grades.

“To me, it seemed the middle school teachers are not necessarily really qualified to teach math, because they don’t know the underlying math concepts well enough,” Lempp said. 

The elementary education program at UW-Madison requires 60 credits. Those credits include three math courses: Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Teaching Elementary Mathematics 1;Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Teaching Elementary Mathematics 2; and Teaching Mathematics.  

Todd Finkelmeyer, a spokesperson for the School of Education, said two years ago, the school changed the math courses in response to changes in DPI certification requirements.

“The integration was motivated by the need for more coherence in the elementary education program, and what we know from best practice and research (is) that to be a good math teacher, one needs to both understand the content — while also learning how best to convey the math to students,” Finkelmeyer said.

The elementary education math courses are led by math educators from the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, with expertise in mathematics and pedagogy, he said.

——-

2007 math forum audio video 

Connected Math

Discovery Math

Singapore Math

Remedial math

Madison’s most recent Math Task Force

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

Allysia Finley:

a similar phenomenon exists in K-12 education—is helping to drive the “Make America Healthy Again” movement. Bigger government has benefited the health-industrial complex but not Americans.

One problem is that simply having insurance doesn’t change people’s behavior. It does, however, cause them to use more care. This is a particular problem in Medicaid, since beneficiaries often rush to the emergency room for nonemergencies because they don’t have deductibles or co-pays.

Another problem: The nearly 100 million Americans on Medicaid or tightly regulated and generously subsidized exchange plans struggle to find doctors to treat them. Physician access for Medicaid patients has long been limited owing to the program’s low reimbursement rates.

It has gotten worse since ObamaCare expanded eligibility, as states have tried to hold down Medicaid costs by reducing reimbursements. A 2019 study found that patients were only half as likely to get an appointment with a doctor compared with privately insured patients before the law passed. Post-ObamaCare, they were less than one-third as likely. Medicaid is insurance in name only.

Patients with exchange plans hardly fare better. Affordable Care Act plan networks include on average only 40% of local physicians and 21% of those employed by hospitals. Patients must pay significantly more out of pocket to see out-of-network doctors. If you find a doctor in network, there’s no guarantee he’ll continue to be. Insurers are narrowing coverage to keep down costs.

They are also hiking deductibles, which this year averaged $5,241 for a typical plan. That’s up from $2,425 in 2014. Although subsidies reduce how much people with ObamaCare plans pay toward their premiums, they are stuck paying out of pocket until they hit their deductible.

Dr Drang:

I’m still not sure how to think about AI. While some aspects of it seem useful, I’m not sure I care about them. The few times I’ve tried it out on topics of interest to me, using both ChatGPT and Perplexity it’s failed.

And there have also been failures on tests that I didn’t mean to run. Last week, during the Illinois-Northwestern football game, my sons and I were wondering whether a Northwestern receiver, Calvin Johnson, was related to the former Detroit Lions receiver of the same name (but who is probably better remembered for his nickname, Megatron). My older son pulled out his phone and Googled. The Gemini answer, which appeared above the links, said he was Megatron’s son, but the very first line of one of the top links said

He may not be related to Megatron, but Northwestern will welcome this Calvin Johnson to Evanston with open arms.

More disturbing than obvious outright errors like that is the possibility that using AI will affect our ability to judge its value. I’m thinking of something that came up in a recent episode of The Talk Show, the one with Joanna Stern. Starting about 53 minutes into the show, they start talking about they both asked ChatGPT to make an image of what it thinks their life looks like. Joanna tried it twice, and you can see the images by following links in the show notes. Prominent in both images were representations of scouting.

David Blaska summary:

Madison will elect three of the seven school board members, seats currently held by Laura Simkin (seat 3), Ali Muldrow (seat 4), and Nichelle Nichols (seat 5). Uniquely in the entire state, candidates run district wide but must specify which seat. Three-year terms, also an oddity.

If April 1, 2025 seems a leap into infinity and beyond, consider that the deadline to file nomination papers is 5 p.m Tuesday, January 7. One month from the here and now.

More information on gathering nomination signatures, here.

Konstantin Kisin:

President-elect Donald J. Trump has a clear mandate to reform higher education in his second term, for two reasons.

First, Vice-President Kamala Harris’ association with unpopular ‘woke’ ideas emanating from higher education was one of the biggest reasonsTrump won the election. Some of these ideas merely offended the average American’s moral sensibilities—like the idea that America is fundamentally bad; that people should be judged, admitted to college, and hired on the basis of their race or gender; or that there is moral equivalence between Israel (the Middle East’s only democracy) and Hamas (an openly genocidal terror group that uses its own citizens as human shields). Other ideas—like ‘defund the police’, open borders, and no cash bail—inspired policy mistakes that caused major quality-of-life issues in Democrat-run cities. Voters in those cities shifted towards Trump (or moved away from the cities) faster than any other group.

Harris didn’t help herself by responding tepidly and equivocally to a full year, post-October 7th, of near-constant antisemitic—sometimes explicitly pro-genocide and pro-terror—agitation on many college campuses. Only four years ago, Joe Biden claimed he was inspired to run for President by a single far-right antisemitic rally in Charlottesville, which showed him that we needed to battle “for the soul of this nation”. But a full year of nightly far-left Charlottesvilles on campus somehow doesn’t threaten the nation’s soul?

Second, these bad ideas have created public-trust problems for universities which are no longer deniable. U.S. universities have lost trust over the past decade in lockstep with the rise in symptoms of their woke takeover. Polls suggest this is not a coincidence (see the chart below). Enrollment has declined over the same time period, driven largely by a sharp decline among men, who increasingly reject wokeness. The enrollment decline may have accelerated this past year. Even left-leaning outlets like the New York Times have started publishing embarrassing stories about university leaders subordinating their research and teaching missions to woke fads, wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the process. Employers are increasingly shunning graduates from elite schools, whose brands have been tainted by extremism and antisemitism, and shifts away from merit in admissions. The public has had enough, and rightly so. “We asked for it,” Case Western English professor Michael Clune observed in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Nic Querolo:

The number of colleges that close each year is poised to significantly increase as schools contend with a slowdown in prospective students. 

That’s the finding of a new working paperpublished by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, where researchers created predictive models of schools’ financial distress using metrics like enrollment and staffing patterns, sources of revenue and liquidity data. They overlayed those models with simulations to estimate the likely increase of future closures.

University of Austin

• Homer’s Odyssey
• How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley
  • Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
• Plato’s Republic
• Creativity by Mihaley Csikszentmihalyi
• The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
• Aeschylus’s Oresteia
• The Book of Genesis
• Hesiod’s Theogony

• Literary Works: Homer’s Odyssey, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, The Book of Genesis, Hesiod’s Theogony. • Philosophical Texts: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s Republic. • Other Notable Works: How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley, Creativity by Mihaley Csikszentmihalyi, The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.

Erica York:

New Internal Revenue Service data for tax year 2022 shows the US federal income tax system continues to be progressive as high-income taxpayers pay the highest average income tax rates. Average tax rates for all income groups remained lower in 2022, five years after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), than they were in 2017 prior to the reform.

• In 2022, taxpayers filed 153.8 million tax returns, reported earning nearly $14.8 trillion in adjusted gross income(AGI), and paid $2.1 trillion in individual income taxes.
• The average income tax rate in 2022 was 14.5 percent. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 23.1 percent average rate, six times higher than the 3.7 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers.

Chun Han Wong:

Sightseeing travelers from China have swamped the grounds of Singapore’s two biggest universities, peering into classrooms, snapping selfies and even barging into lectures to get a sampling of the education. From tiger parents and their children to trend-chasing influencers, visitors cite the allure of campus life in a Southeast Asian city-state known for its clean streets, lush greenery and first-rate colleges.

The influx has annoyed scholars and students. In online forums and on social media, they complain about being crowded out of cafeterias, study areas and other student zones by busloads of tourists.

“Tourists are openly abusing the fact that our campus is open to the public,” said Benjamin Liu, a fourth-year psychology student at Nanyang Technological University, or NTU. “We were inherently trusting the public not to abuse our facilities. But these tourists show no such respect for us.”

“Many of them weren’t shy to take a few pictures or videos too. I think to them it’s like observing zoo exhibits,” recalled a recent graduate from one of the universities. “At the same time, we were observing them and the reactions on their faces.”

Bryce Hill:

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is currently set to receive a pension worth an estimated $3.8 million through the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund and the Municipal Employees Annuity and Benefit Fund.

He qualifies for these benefits thanks to multiple loopholes in the state’s pension code. His pension payout could ultimately be worth far more – maybe $5.53 million – by further leveraging these loopholes after four years in a classroom and his first term as mayor.

Austin Berg

NEW: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s pensions are worth an estimated $3.8 million after only four years as a teacher and one term as mayor.

John Arnold:

Projected Chicago area budget deficits for upcoming year
Chicago Public Schools: $505 mil
Chicago Transit: $577 mil
City of Chicago: $982 mil
Cook County: $218 mil
Illinois: $3.2 bil

Even Univ off Chicago has $221 million deficit. Each also faces huge unfunded pension debt.

Rick Rojas:

But first, Ms. Hooper stood before the student body at Abundance Educational Academy in Mississippi and closed her eyes.

“I ask in Jesus’s name that our students supernaturally learn everything presented before them on today,” Ms. Hooper, a longtime teacher who founded the small private school about three years ago, said in a prayer on a recent morning, savoring that peaceful moment soon after everyone arrived.

—-

Madison $pends far more than most….

Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. U.S. House of Representatives

Financial data can tell a person’s story, including one’s “religion, ideology, opinions, and interests”1 as well as one’s “political leanings, locations, and more.”2 Because of this data’s usefulness, federal law enforcement agencies increasingly coordinate with financial institutions to secure even greater access to Americans’ private financial information, often without legal process, and use federal laws like the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) to do so. This interim report continues the oversight of the Committee on the Judiciary and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government into financial surveillance in the United States. Based. on nonpublic documents, this report sheds new light on the decaying state of Americans’ financial privacy and the federal government’s widespread, warrantless surveillance programs.

The Committee and Select Subcommittee began this investigation into government-led financial surveillance after a whistleblower disclosed that following the events of January 6, 2021, Bank of America (BoA), voluntarily and without legal process, provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with a list of names of all individuals who used a BoA credit or debit card in the Washington, D.C. region around that time.3 In response to these allegations and corroborating testimony from FBI officials, the Committee and Select Subcommittee requested documents from BoA and six other national financial institutions about the provision of Americans’ private financial information to federal law enforcement without legal process.4 On March 6, 2024, the Committee and Select Subcommittee released an interim report revealing that federal law enforcement had used sweeping search terms like “MAGA” and “TRUMP” to target Americans and even treated purchases of religious texts or firearms as indicators of “extremism.”5 That report detailed how federal law enforcement derisively viewed American citizens—treating Americans who expressed opposition to firearm regulations, open borders, COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and the “deep state” as potential domestic terrorists.6

Joe Pitts

Institutions of higher education are bracing for a crunch, if they aren’t experiencing one already. Slowing population growth, mounting skepticism of academia, and various other factors have provoked college leaders—at least perceptive ones—to craft novel strategies to navigate these perilous waters. Universities will be increasingly competing for a shrinking pool of customers in the years to come. How these institutions differentiate themselves and win over students will determine their ability to survive in the 21st century.

Universities, like firms in any stagnating market, will need to find new revenue sources or cut costs. There is no other way out of this conundrum. As Beth Akers, an economist studying higher education, has argued, the looming crunch may actually benefit students: “Higher education, the golden child of the movement to advance social mobility, has rested on its laurels and failed to incorporate innovations that will better serve students and our nation.” Necessity is the mother of invention. Declining revenues coupled with fierce competition may be what universities need to slash waste and deliver economic results for students.

Paying at the program level reduces the cross-subsidization implicit in charging a flat rate for all programs.In light of such shifts, a growing share of institutions are weighing the adoption of differential tuition (DT) policies. Conceptually, the model is simple. Instead of charging a flat rate for tuition regardless of major area or degree program, universities charge tuition based on the instructional costs of particular areas of study. Mechanical engineering majors, for instance, would likely pay higher tuition than English majors at a university implementing DT.

Karen Sloan:

Bar admission authorities in California will consider applicants’ participation in campus protests on an “individual basis” during the moral character process, following an internal review.

A State Bar of California working group, which took up the issue of whether and how the bar should continue to weigh applicants’ participation in campus protests when determining if they have the moral character to become licensed attorneys, said that evaluators must be careful to exclude protected political speech or expression, according to a memo slated to be discussed by the state bar’s Committee of Bar Examiners on Friday.

Frederick Hess

It’s been a tough stretch for college presidents, but things are about to get tougher. The past few years have been marked by falling enrollment and declining trust in higher education, public frustration with campus protests, and Congressional hearings that helped end the tenures of several high-profile university presidents. Now, the pressure is about to rise to a whole new level.

The vice president-elect has deemed universities “the enemy.” President-elect Trump has promised to dismantle DEI, bust the accreditation cartel, and boost the tax on college endowments. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-chairs of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, have discovered the hefty overhead rates that higher education pockets for taxpayer-funded research and eachsuggested that slashing those is on their to-do list. Another administration priority, getting tough on illegal immigration, will have big ramifications for students and staff at many campuses. It’s going to be a long four years for college presidents.

Gloria Romero:

As part of Donald Trump’s effort to make America great again, I propose that we make America read again. One way to start would be to dismantle the Department of Education and return its responsibilities to the states.

The education industrial complex is a quagmire. Nationally, student academic outcomes have plateaued or declined. Wide achievement disparities affecting racial and ethnic minorities should shock the American conscience. Parents, particularly of African-American and Latino students, want to close these gaps and have embraced school choice. The Trump administration has an opportunity to deliver for children who for generations have been trapped in failing schools by the Democratic Party.

In 1979 President Jimmy Carter, backed by the teachers unions, signed the Department of Education Organization Act. A single department, he reasoned, would reduce administrative costs and improve efficiency. It didn’t.