Wall Street Silver

Final numbers for fiscal year 2024

Total US govt revenue = $4.918 trillion
Interest on natl debt = $1.133 trillion
23% of all govt revenue went to interest on the debt.

2025 fiscal year started Oct 1st, we are on pace for 30% of all govt revenue going to interest payments.

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

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

This morning it’s grades. They’re getting rid of them. No more letters, only “advanced,” “proficient,” “developing,” and “emerging.” Only four categories — apparently no one will fail.

Actually, this is nothing new. MMSD has had this system for elementary and middle schoolers for a while and it was being “piloted” (read: phased in) at East High School. Now it will go districtwide at some point in the next couple of years.

For elementary students I’m not sure this is such a bad idea. No reason to crush the souls of little kids with D’s and F’s. But when a kid gets to high school he should start to get a taste of the real world, where there is, in fact, such a thing as failure. And dealing with those inevitable failures is something adults need to learn to do. Shielding kids from disappointment is a bad idea — especially when it’s disappointment in himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Dave Cieslewicz:

And, of course, all of the underlying reasons to send the school board a message about their priorities and their performance are still very much there. This is a district with some of the lowest test scores and some of the highest absenteeism rates in the state, a district where the racial achievement gap is the highest in the state and where there were 800 police calls to schools last year. And it’s a district so badly managed that they plan to take a decade to fix a $3 million shortfall in their free lunch program. A district so fiscally undisciplined that it will add 100 new staff positions to schools that have seen declining enrollments for a decade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Glenn Greenwald:

Yes, this is all a complete lie from @karaswisher on CNN – as they claim she’s the one who “knows.”

Twitter locked the NY Post out of their account for 2 weeks – until 3 days before the election – because the NY Post refused to remove links to 6 stories about Biden.

Ted McDermott Public Service Journalism Team

These allegations from students, parents and staff of the Flandreau Indian School – an off-reservation Bureau of Indian Education-operated boarding school – are at the center of this Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team investigation. But they are not news to the BIE itself. 

The bureau has known about these concerns – as well as others – since the fall of 2023. That’s when Lexi Follette, an alumnus of the school and the mother of a recent Flandreau graduate, filed a lengthy complaint with the federal government about the treatment of staff and students at the boarding school located in southeastern South Dakota. 

By Becky Jacobs

More than a year after the school’s current president announced his retirement, Madison College is starting over in a search for its next leader.

Three finalists were scheduled to attend forums this week and next week in Madison, where employees, students and community members could provide input.

But after one candidate backed out, Donald Dantzler Jr., president of the Madison College District Board of Trustees, canceled the events for the remaining finalists and announced Tuesday the board will restart its search.

Noah Smith:

So anyway, I want to go through a bunch of progressive issues from the 2010s — immigration, DEI, energy and climate, crime and policing, the welfare state, universal health care, unions, and trans rights — and explain why I think they’re all mostly stuck. 

Immigration

In the 2010s, immigration went from a technocratic consensus to a progressive cause célèbre. This happened for two reasons. The primary reason was that Donald Trump and his reactionary movement were against immigration, probably on racial grounds (though they never explicitly admit this). For many progressives, that made fighting for immigration a way of fighting against racism. A more minor reason was that many progressives either implicitly or explicitly bought into the idea that immigration would create a permanent Democratic majority. 

In the 2010s, pro-immigration sentiment soared. In 2020, Gallup reported that for the first time since it started keeping track in 1965, the percent of Americans who said they want more immigration was larger than the percent who said they want less:

More.

Christopher Rufo:

The most significant of these initiatives is the agency-wide effort to redirect billions of dollars toward supposedly oppressed racial groups and other “underserved communities.” In 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary Yellen jointly announced$8.7 billion in investments to increase lending to “minority-owned businesses,” among other groups. Two years later, the Treasury announced that some 30 private companies were committed to raising $3 billionin deposits for “underserved communities,” to be delivered through community-development financial institutions (CDFIs) and minority depository institutions (MDIs).

The State Small Business Capital Initiative is another node of the department’s slush fund for favored racial groups. In 2021, Treasury announced that it was using SSBCI to route $2.5 billion to “businesses owned by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals, including those in communities of color.” The first $1.5 billion of this total was earmarked for small businesses in Treasury-designated areas “owned by individuals that have faced barriers . . . including membership in a group that has been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias within American society.” The other $1 billion went to “incentive funds” aimed at increasing venture capital investments in these businesses.

Secretary Yellen has also intensified Treasury’s commitment to awarding federal contracts based on race. Treasury openly discriminates in favor of “diverse” businesses, reporting to Congress that the department’s Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (OMWI) was committed to “[e]stablish[ing] an organizational climate that advances procurement equity”—that is, “the percentages of contract obligations awarded to minority-owned and women-owned businesses.” Earlier this year, the department reported progress: Treasury had “[i]ncreased federal business with Black businesses” to “over $188 million in government contracts.”

David Adam:

The initial process was much more informal than the one scientists know today, which became formalized in the 1970s, she adds. “Some early referees’ reports have news about their holidays or what else they are doing.”

What do these and other discussions show us about peer review? “When peer review goes well, it is a system that allows authors to improve the way they communicate their results. It is a unique moment of candid exchange between scientists where anonymity can neutralize the discourse,” Ferlier suggests.

“When it goes wrong, it can be a biased or inefficient quality-control that simply slows down the circulation of scientific knowledge.”

Nature rummaged through the archive for insights into the evolution of peer review.

More.

Zoe Williams:

There’s no curriculum for any part of TY, but core subjects – Irish, English, maths, PE – have to be covered in some form, for two hours a week. Work experience is recommended at two to four weeks a year; career guidance and social, personal and health education (SPHE) for an hour a week. Otherwise, schools decide for themselves what to do.

Hare canters through what’s going on in his TY for 2024-25: nine weeks each of Chinese, folklore and law; nine weeks of BodyRight, a consent, relationships and friendship workshop devised by Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. Then there’s everything from aviation to arts, coding to car maintenance, political engagement to boxing. There’s a young scientist programme, with two separate blocks of work experience. As part of a Stem module, two former police officers set up a crime scene and show kids how to run an investigation.

Harvard Graduate School of Education Event:

In a ballot question this fall, voters in Massachusetts will be asked if they wish to end the requirement that high school students pass exit exams in math, English, and science to earn a diploma. Critics of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) graduation requirement point to national studies that have connected these types of standardized exams to higher dropout rates for students of color and students from low-income families, while supporters say they maintain academic standards. With only a handful of states still using high school exit exams, we consider their effectiveness and discuss ways to help all youth succeed, including the most vulnerable.

Key Takeaways



State assessments should be made accessible to all students — translated into multiple languages, built on universal design principles, and include accommodations for students with disabilities.


Supporters of high-stakes graduation tests, like the MCAS exams in Massachusetts, say they put pressure on educators and leaders to provide support to meet the needs of all students. The high school graduation requirement also encourages students to engage in their learning process, supporters say.


In Massachusetts, there are alternative pathways for students to show their competency in math, English, and science, besides MCAS exams. However, the different pathways, including an appeals process, are not always fully utilized by school districts.

Notes on politics and the Massachusetts’ graduation exam.

The taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI recently reduced rigor….

Will Flanders:

Madison Percent teaching staff: 50.61%

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Kayla Huynh

Madison children and teens are becoming increasingly involved in activities outside of class, according to a recent report on hundreds of clubs and athletics programs run by the public school district.

Nearly 60% of middle and high school students participated last school year in at least one co-curricular activity sponsored by the Madison Metropolitan School District, a 6 percentage point jump from 2021-22, according to figuresshared with the Madison School Board this month.

The school district has expanded programming, increased transportation options and nearly doubled the number of recreation staff to further boost participation among middle school students, said Mary Roth, who leads Madison School & Community Recreation, or MSCR.

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]

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?

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Student loans and controversial debt forgiveness programs also an Education Department responsibility

Managing federal student loans also falls under the department’s oversight.

Under the Biden administration, the department has canceled more than $160 billion in student loans for 4.7 million borrowers, largely by adjusting the rules of existing programs.

The department also issues regulations about how civil rights laws should apply to students, under the direction of the administration.

The Obama administration, for example, wrote new rules on sexual assault in schools and colleges. The Trump administration rolled them back, handing more protections to those accused of assault and saying the previous rules went too far.

More recently, the Biden administration wrote rules providing greater and more explicit protections for LGBTQ students. Republican-led states have sued to block the rules, with a judge putting the regulations on pause in many states, including some schools in Wisconsin.

It would be useful to evaluate the role and effectiveness of the taxpayer funded federal grants (“grant making industrial complex”)on k-12….

More.

And.

Curiously, after reducing rigor statewide, Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly chimes in.

——

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

——

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]

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?

Colin McGourty:

22-year-old GM Kirill Shevchenko has been expelled from the 2024 Spanish Team Championship with his draw against GM Bassem Amin in round one and win over GM Francisco Vallejo in round two turned into losses. When Shevchenko’s regular absence from the board aroused suspicion in round two a locked phone was found in the toilet, with arbiters claiming a link of the phone to Shevchenko based on handwriting and behavior. 

The 2024 Spanish Team Championship Honor Division, taking place in the North African Spanish city of Melilla from October 12-18, has been shaken by a scandal after Shevchenko, playing for C.A. Silla – Integrant Col·lectius, was expelled from the tournament.

Shevchenko, who was born in Ukraine and has since switched to represent Romania, is the world number-69 and became a grandmaster at the age of 14 years and nine months. His greatest achievements include winning the 2021 European Team Chess Championship with Ukraine, as well as the individual Lindores Abbey Blitz in Riga in the same year, where he topped the table ahead of GMs Fabiano Caruana and Arjun Erigaisi.  

Alec Johnson:

The new look for the old Cardinal Stritch University site in Fox Point and Glendale is becoming clearer, as St. Augustine Preparatory Academy broke ground Wednesday for its new North Campus, which will serve students in 4-year-old kindergarten through 12th grade.

The school is scheduled to open in fall 2026 with just over 300 students. Officials estimate it will take about seven years after the school opens to reach its desired capacity of over 1,000 students. The school plans to start with grades 4K through six and nine, then add grades each year until it becomes a full 4K-12 school.

Plans for the school call for STEM labs, music and fine arts spaces. Its athletic facilities will include a new fieldhouse, turf soccer field and an outdoor track. It will also include facilities “for college and career readiness, and health care for students and families,” said a news release from the school.

Center For American Rights:

The Center for American Rights (CAR) has filed a formal complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) against WCBS-TV, a CBS-owned station, for engaging in significant and intentional news distortion.

The complaint stems from two different broadcasts of the same interview aired on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and “60 Minutes” on October 5 and 6, 2024. In both broadcasts, the same question was posed to Vice President Kamala Harris regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but CBS aired two conflicting responses. These discrepancies, CAR argues, amount to deliberate news distortion—a violation of FCC rules governing broadcasters’ public interest obligations. The complaint demands CBS release the unedited transcript of the interview to set the record straight.

“This isn’t just about one interview or one network,” said Daniel Suhr, President of the Center for American Rights. “This is about the public’s trust in the media on critical issues of national security and international relations during one of the most consequential elections of our time. When broadcasters manipulate interviews and distort reality, it undermines democracy itself. The FCC must act swiftly to restore public confidence in our news media.”

50can:

The “State of Educational Opportunity in America: A Survey of 20,000 parents” is a new 50-state study from 50CAN and Edge Research, offering an unprecedented, state-by-state examination of the current education landscape and what is important to parents.

The 200-page report is available for download in full and by question or state.

Kevin Mahnken:

At the heart of the conflict rests an elemental question: Who will govern Chicago’s schools? Mayors have enjoyed the right to appoint and dismiss members of the school board for nearly three decades, and Johnson’s slate of replacements will be able to approve his agenda once they are seated. But the Illinois legislature recently swept aside mayoral control over the district, charging the city with establishing a popularly elected, 21-seat board by 2027. In November, voters will choose the first 10 elected members, with Johnson appointing 11, to a hybrid body that will preside over the transition.

The district will spend that interregnum attempting to balance its accounts, while also negotiating new contracts for teachers and principals and deciding the fate of scores of under-enrolled schools. Local K–12 leaders foresee increasingly bitter disputes arising over the reach of the CTU, which now appears to hold most of the leverage over critical decisions. At the same time, their opponents increasingly question the legitimacy of a process that has seen one iteration of the school board precipitously leave office, and another be appointed in its place, just weeks before the election of a third set of candidates. 

Peter Sipe:

about life, not death – death is merely the detail that gets these stories of life printed. And kids should read these life stories because they are: 

• Informative: Obituaries are some of the most nutrient-dense texts a child can read. They’re biography, history, and often works of literature – major newspapers put some of their best writers on the obit beat. 
• Interesting: Whether it’s the New York Timesor the Washington Post or the The Telegraph, the obituaries section is exclusive real estate. They don’t let boring people in. 
• Inspirational: The curriculum features the obituaries of a flight attendant, a math professor, a farm hand, an inventor, a lieutenant colonel, and a lottery winner. The first five feature bravery, kindness, perseverance, ingenuity, and levelheadedness, all qualities we’d want children to acquire. (As for the sixth – “a cautionary fable worthy of Aesop” – it was a musical she inspired.)

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

It’s shameful. Chicago Public School officials want to celebrate a record graduation rate when much of the other data shows they are failing Chicago’s children.

Only 26 percent of CPS 11th-graders can read and do math at grade level, according to the latest Illinois Report Card data, and yet last week the district proudly announced that 84 percent of students graduated from CPS in 2021 – a new record high. 

First of all, color us skeptical about that record high rate. Everyone knows that the city’s children were underserved by remote learning – the failures were reported ad nauseum by the press. Announcing record graduation rates is a way for district officials to sweep those failures under the rug.

But there’s a more fundamental problem: the graduation rate distracts from the fact that CPS officials are pushing out poorly educated children. 

Only 26 percent of Chicago 11th-graders are proficient in English Language Arts and only 27 percent proficient in math according to 2019 Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) data.

MacKenzie Chung Fegan, Cesar Hernandez

What’s at stake? If the food is gross, students don’t eat it. With two-thirds of SFUSD studentsdepending on daily breakfasts and lunches for their nutritional needs, the quality, tastiness and, dare we say, presentation of the food matters. It’s no easy task: All school meals must abide by SFUSD nutrition standards, which meet or exceed federal and state guidelines, and the district has about $1.25 to spend for the food and milk per meal after labor and other costs, compared with about $2.50 per meal paid to Revolution Foods, which includes delivery. Since 2021, meals have been free to all 48,000 students regardless of family income.

So we, the Chronicle’s restaurant critics, grabbed our Jansport backpacks, put on our cleanest pairs of sneakers and went back to school, where we sampled the two options and weighed in with our own extremely professional opinions. After an early Revolution Foods lunch at Sloat Elementary, we headed north to Marina Middle School, a Refresh campus. (Two lunches in one day? We call that Thursday.) Below, you’ll find our real-time reactions, and check out our colleague Jill Tucker’s reporting for more information on the two school lunch programs.

“Cynical Publius”

4. On that July Sunday, some Biden staffer—taking orders from Obama or one of the other 25th Amendment extortion cabal members—posted that weird Biden candidacy resignation on X.
5. Jill Biden got super PO’d, knew the X account password, and posted that strange follow-on post minutes later saying Joe endorsed Kamala. She did it to screw with and spite all the Dem leaders who had kicked her out of her plush First Lady gig.

Deanna Pan and Emma Platoff

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

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

Mulligans are a thing in Wisconsin’s Evers era.

——-

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Noe Goldhaber

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

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

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

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

Current www.

Camus Excerpt

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

Judith Davidoff & Liam Beran:

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

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

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

Alex Saloutos:

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

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

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

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

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

Danielle DuClos:

But Madison leaders have known of a growing budget deficit for years. In 2021, the mayor’s proposed budget projected an $18 million to $20 million shortfall by 2023 — even with pandemic-related funding to help balance the books.

Yet, the Madison City Council approved 5% and 6% raises for city employees in 2023 and 2024, respectively. The 2023 increases, which included public safety employees, cost about $7.2 million. This year’s pay raises added $4.9 million in costs for general municipal employees and $3 million for public safety employees, city figures show.

About $14.6 million of the anticipated $22 million deficit next year can be traced to labor costs, such as raises, health insurance and other fringe benefits, said Jason Stein, president of the nonpartisan research group Wisconsin Policy Forum.

While the city’s pay raises are not out of character for the rate of inflation, property tax collections aren’t keeping pace with the growth in wages, Stein said.

David Blaska:

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

And:

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

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

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

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

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

Sort of related by Mike Bloomberg:

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

Former Madison mayor and local leaders urge ‘No’ vote on property tax referendum, criticize city’s fiscal strategy

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

Corrinne Hess

“The property taxpayers are paying more than we receive in state aid,” Means said. “I think that makes passing referendums difficult.” 

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Abbey Machtig:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

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

We learn two main things about the program:

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

John McGinnis:

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

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

Chris Edwards:

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

Jennifer Berkshire:

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

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

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

Matt Taibbi:

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

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

John Robb:

Networked Politics

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

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

Networked Tribalism

Joel Kotkin:

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Velasco:

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

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

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

Francesca Block:

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

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

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

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

Nicholas Confessore:

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

Steve McGuire:

“The rote incantations of a state religion.”

This is an incredible exposé of academic DEI.

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

Better late than never, NYT!

i/o

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

Sasha:

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

Abbey Machtig:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

epoch ai:

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

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

Katie Langin:

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

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

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

FIRE:

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

This has major implications for Americans’ First Amendment rights.

Beverly Hirtle and Anna Kovner

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

More.

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

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

Mark Dent:

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

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

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

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

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

Corrine Hess:

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

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

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

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

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

Notes and links on the Foundation for Madison Public Schools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Will Flanders:

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

More.

Scott Manley:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Austin Berg:

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

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

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

More.

CTU spends just 17 cents on representing teachers.

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

Kayla Huynh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Glenn Reynolds:

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

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

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

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

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

Patrick Eddington and James Craven:

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

Now they want to force you to unlock your phone.

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

Christopher Rufo:

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

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

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

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

Marc Benioff

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

More.

Hunter Gehlbach , Carly D. Robinson, Angus Fletcher

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

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

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

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

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

Kelly Meyerhofer and Cleo Krejici:

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

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

Here’s six takeaways from our analysis:

Average technical college president compensation package outpaces regional UW chancellors

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

WILL:

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

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

More.

A summary.

James Gordon:

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

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

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

More.

Daniel Buck:

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

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

Te-ping Chen:

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

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

David Brooks:

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

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

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

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

More.

Nadya Williams

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

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

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

Wisconsin State Journal:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Mark J Stern:

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

More.

Andrew Billen:

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

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

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

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

Matthew Stanmyre

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

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

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

Tyler Cowen Summary:

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

Rupa Subramanya

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

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

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

Vladimir Kogan:

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

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

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

Gregg Easterbrook:

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

Chalk & Talk:

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

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

Christopher Rufo:

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

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

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

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

UBL

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

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

Eugene Volokh:

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

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

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

Abbey Machtig:

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

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

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

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

Governor.Virginia.gov

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

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

More.

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

Dave Cieslewicz

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

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

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

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

Jose Luis Espert:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

America’s Future:

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

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

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

IRG:

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

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

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

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

Much more, here.

Joanne Jacobs:

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

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

David Wakelyn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Cremieux

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

More.

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

And.

Sonya Huang and Pat Grady:

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

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

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

Nicholas Eberstadt:

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

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

Choose life.

Tressa Pankovits

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

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

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

Bill Ackman:

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

Paul Vallas:

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

Eugene Volokh:

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

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

Joanne Jacobs:

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

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

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

Stephen Wolfram:

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon:

No. This is incorrect.

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

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

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

Dan Lennington:

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

Jerry Dunleavy:

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

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

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

WILL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More.

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Ripple effects:

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

This first one’s a doozy: