Erin Gretzinger:

Between state open enrollment, some of our charter school opportunities, private school, home schooling — even more popular out of the pandemic than before — there are definitely downward pressures on enrollment. It’s one of the reasons that we have to look very carefully at areas where we’re vulnerable. So if we see a school in our city that we’re experiencing declining enrollment, we have to look at all factors considered and see what we can do to strengthen our ability to enroll students here.

The state’s most recent open enrollment numbers show MMSD had a net loss of 1,258 students last school year — about 200 more students than the year prior. What factors are you really thinking about or worried about driving open enrollment out of the district?

There’s a lot of reasons that families and students choose open enrollment, and I think that perception and personal choice are likely the two biggest. ‘The school isn’t good enough for me. … It’s unsafe. I’m not challenged. The test scores aren’t as good as this other school that I have the chance to go to.’ Or, just a personal choice of, ‘I’m choosing to go to this school district because it’s a school or a type of program that I want.’

We don’t see as many specialized school(s) or magnet or charter personal choices like that here as I’ve experienced in other places, but I know on a larger scale what that means to have options. And what I want to try to do is create additional options in Madison so that people don’t have to look elsewhere for them.

———

Where Have All The Students Gone? 1995-2024

——

30 October 2025 Madison School Board approves a $668,000,000 budget for 25,557 “full time equivalent” students & around 7,000 employees.

———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“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?

Corrinne Hess:

That’s the caption Amanda Vogel wrote on the TikTok video she posted depicting her 4-year-old daughter on stage during a school concert. 

Her daughter is in a wheelchair, sitting on the side of the stage, as the other children perform on risers.

WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” newsletter keeps you connected to the state you love without feeling overwhelmed. No paywall. No agenda. No corporate filter.

“We did not plan to homeschool. We tried our best to set up a good foundation for her to be successful and included at school,” Vogel wrote. “Unfortunately, there is only so much parents can do on their end. Watching her placed off to the side while her peers stood together and realizing no one noticed before the end of the concert was it for us.” 

Vogel uploaded the video of the 2023 concert in December 2025, after pulling her daughter from the School District of Pittsville in Wood County.

The video has 917,500 likes and has been shared nearly 28,000 times as of Friday afternoon.

According to the school district officials, Vogel’s video is harassment. 

On Dec. 19, 2025, two days after the video was posted, attorneys for the district sent Vogel a letter demanding she “cease and desist from engaging in any additional harassing and intimidating behavior toward District educators and support staff.”

Shruti Singh

It would be the first time since the payment policy took effect in 2023 that the city isn’t planning to pay the full amount in January. The move underscores the financial stress that Chicago is facing. Local property tax distributions from Cook County have arrived late and the city’s expenses including for labor, pensions and material continue to rise.

Three years ago, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot had implemented the advance pension payment policy to reduce interest costs on the city’s large unfunded pension liability. Between 2023 and 2025, the city contributed $820.5 million in advance pension payments, according to budget documents. 

The payments, separate from the required annual contributions that Chicago needs to make to the retirement systems, help curb future costs and serve as a supplement to the mandated contributions. The city’s goal is to bring its pensions to 90% funded in the next three decades. Chicago’s required pension contribution tops $2 billion annually, accounting for about 38% of revenue.

Johnson had proposed a roughly $120 million advance pension payment for this year. A number that a bloc of aldermen decried.

By Rob Schneider 

So, while executives pat themselves on the back for their “virtue,” their studios are plunged into debt. According to public filings, as of late 2025, Disney’s debt is roughly $35.3 billion and Warner Bros. Discovery’s debt stands at approximately $33.5 billion. Cinema attendance continues to decline, with annual box office receipts in North America struggling to reach $9 billion. In a world where production and marketing costs have skyrocketed, these numbers represent a dying industry.

It turns out that audiences prefer to be entertained rather than hectored. If people wanted a sermon, they’d probably just stick to church. I’ll make a prediction right now: if things don’t change, they won’t be making movies on those legendary big studio lots in five years’ time — they’ll be selling them off as prime real estate for luxury condos. You can’t continually patronize and insult your customers and expect to keep the lights on.

Jeffrey Mervis:

In an unprecedented step for a major research university, Purdue University has begun to curb the flow of Chinese graduate students to its Indiana campuses. The policy follows pressure from Congress and President Donald Trump for U.S. institutions to monitor Chinese scholars more closely but goes far beyond those demands.

The directive, which was first reported in early December 2025 by the Lafayette Journal & Courier and the Purdue student newspaper, has never been put in writing. But several faculty members confirmed to Science that it is in effect. Last spring it apparently led Purdue to rescind departmental letters of acceptance to more than 100 graduate students, most from China. More recently it is impacting students that faculty members would like to employ as research assistants in their lab but whom the university has not admitted into a doctoral program.

“The policy doesn’t make any sense,” says one faculty member, who like others requested anonymity because faculty have been ordered not to talk to the media. If it continues, “we’ll experience a huge brain drain of talented students simply because the university is willing to capitulate to avoid being targeted by this administration.”

Esther Wickham:

Educators for St. Hope Public Schools in Sacramento are requesting a vote to end the Sacramento City Teachers Association’s authority over their school.  

Earlier this month, St. Hope educator Beth Simonton filed a petition, backed by a majority of her coworkers, asking the National Labor Relations Board to hold a vote to decertify the union as the educators’ bargaining representative.

SCTA is an affiliate of both the California Teachers Association and the National Education Association.

The National Right to Work Foundation is providing legal representation for Simonton.

In the next few weeks, the NLRB will hold a hearing regarding Simonton’s petition and schedule a vote since the petition meets all the requirements to trigger a decertification election. However, the process could be significantly delayed if SCTA officials pursue legal challenges aimed at blocking or postponing the vote, according to Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation.

Daisy Christodolou:

We ran a project like this last year, but gave schools very short notice about the redraft. This meant that whilst approximately 36,000 students from 900 schools took part in the original assessment, only 3,851 from 73 schools took part in the follow up. This year we have given schools more notice, so we hope that we’ll get more taking part in the redraft. 

The project is not a gold-standard randomised controlled trial, but it will still provide schools with rapid and useful information about how students respond to feedback. It would also be possible to use the same Comparative Judgement plus AI write-feedback-redraft model as part of an RCT. 

Improving the feedback

We’re also planning a couple of changes to the feedback that students get.

Phillip Rogaway

We stand today at the brink of civilizational and environmental collapse. What role have we computer scientists been playing in alleviating—or exacerbating—this threat? What role should we be playing? These are questions that many of us reflexively shun. At the same time, proceeding with business-as-usual, as most of us do, seems like madness.

Austin Berg:

It happened on Friday, Jan. 16, when leadership at the Chicago Teachers Union published financial information that they had kept hidden for years.

The CTU’s internal bylaws require leadership to produce an audit for members every year. But the last audit ever shown to members was posted Sept. 9, 2020.

So members concerned with basic transparency—especially as the union transformed into the city’s largest political spender and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s top financial backer—had been demanding to see those audits ever since.

In return, those members endured lies and bullying from CTU leadership.

But their persistence paid off.1

The newly published audits reveal several inconsistencies in union reporting that may have led to misstatements to members and the federal government, according to information published exclusively by The Last Ward.

CTU members saw something new when opening up their member portal on Friday.

The website now hosts 11 audits members have never seen before. And the content of those audits suggest several reasons why leadership may have kept them hidden for so long.

Centennial Rye:

lannone: What was your dissertation on?

Wolfe: It was on the League of American Writers, which was a Communist front. That was a very hazardous subject for a dissertation at that time. We are talking about the 1950s, when the debate over McCarthyism was still going strong. Most of the major writers in the country belonged to the League from 1935 to 1939. On the surface it was merely one of many anti-Fascist organizations and had nothing to do with the Communist Party directly.

lannone: Or it said that it didn’t or you believed that it didn’t?

Wolfe: Oh, no, a Communist fraction ran it.

The party used the word “fraction,” not

“faction.” I did a lot of reporting for that dissertation. I interviewed the principals, Communist and non-Communist, and they told me exactly how it was done. You should read it—or maybe you shouldn’t. Talk about a dry piece of sociology. It dealt with political issues only insofar as they affected how the fraction ran the front. That dissertation is so diligently dull and puritanically objective, it’ll dry up your skin and make your teeth fall out.

But I got my Ph.D. My sole interest was in how the Party could turn writers, people who pride themselves on their independence, into what they called “a manipulable mass.” |

The Standard 英文虎報:

China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to a record low, official data showed on Monday, with experts warning of further decline. Li

The country’s population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster decline than 2024, while the total number of births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025, down 17 percent from 9.54 million in 2024. The number of deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed.

China’s birth rate dropped to 5.63 per 1,000 people.

Births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million,” said Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

China’s death rate of 8.04 per 1,000 people in 2025 was the highest since 1968.

——

I knew this trend would continue. Still, the figures released this morning left me genuinely speechless. China’s government announced on Monday (see screenshot below) that births in 2025 fell to 7.92 million, a staggering 1.62 million fewer than in 2024, and that the total fertility rate has dropped to 0.93.

——-

Choose life.

Committee to Unleash Prosperity:

The Financial Times and Harvard Crimson report that 38% of Stanford University students claim a disability. Wait, these are about the most privileged kids on the planet and nearly two of every five have a learning disability? That percentage is up an amazing tenfold since 2014.

As the chart below shows, many other elite Ivy League schools have at least two to three TIMES more “disabled” students than a decade ago.

Do we suddenly have an epidemic of mental and physical health problems afflicting our kids, or do we have another burgeoning scandal with colleges labeling as many students as disabled as possible to chase down more government money? Or is everybody just discovering medical reasons they need extra time on tests?

Bartemy Jones:

I’ve been stewing on this for years. As someone who went to Public school and then had my own kids in a combination of homeschool, private school and public school, I watched kids struggle through a public school system that feels more like indoctrination than inspiration, it’s clear education isn’t what it used to be.

Remember when schools built thinkers, that knew not only a lot of facts, but also how those facts related to life? Those days are gone, largely thanks to a left-leaning agenda that’s twisted learning into a vehicle for socialist ideals. But let’s dive in.

History shows us the way back

Education has always been the bedrock of a free society. It’s how we pass on wisdom, foster independence, and build a nation of self-reliant citizens. But over time, it’s been co-opted. In world history, socialists saw schools as prime real estate for their collectivist dreams. Take this gem from early Marxist thinkers: “He who has the school has the future.” That’s from a 1918 piece by Eden and Cedar Paul, emphasizing how socialists aimed to mold kids through education to align with their ideals.

Melanie Phillips:

Key points from her 4:37 clip:

• Challenge them → you’re not just wrong; you’re evil, standing against human/planetary betterment.
• Dissent must be silenced: no platform, no debate, no hearing.
• Evidence contradicting the ideology is dismissed as lies or “not facts.”
• Universities—once crucibles of reason—are now engines destroying it, while claiming moral superiority.

Cory Turner:

At the top of Brookings’ list of risks is the negative effect AI can have on children’s cognitive growth — how they learn new skills and perceive and solve problems.

The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.

Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns, “When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is … they are not thinking for themselves. They’re not learning to parse truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.“

Cognitive off-loading isn’t new. The report points out that keyboards and computers reduced the need for handwriting, and calculators automated basic math. But AI has “turbocharged” this kind of off-loading, especially in schools where learning can feel transactional.

Unexpectedly, I was recently prompted to consider 2026 Wisconsin Gubernatorial candidates and education.

Herewith are my 2 big goals. Focus:

1. All hands on deck to improve Wisconsin literacy.

a. 97,414 4k-3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group. Data via the 2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener (Act 20)

Did taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly Juice Test Scores for Reelection?

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Big Goal: Drive a Wisconsin Miracle to vault us into the top 5 within 3 years (NAEP). Understanding Our Literacy Crisis.

b. Education Budget:

Increase teacher pay with funds redirected from 99% of the Wisconsin DPI budget. Implement MTEL over the next 2 years.

Alan Borsuk (2018): But consider a couple other things that happened in Massachusetts: Despite opposition, state officials stuck to the requirement. Teacher training programs adjusted curriculum and the percentage of students passing the test rose.

c. Change teacher prep requirements to an emphasis on subject matter competency.

Mark Lilla:

One of the peculiarities of the American educational system, compared with those in other democracies, is that most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like “inquiry-based learning,” than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed.

2. All hands on deck to make Wisconsin among the top 5 affordable states for living, learning, starting and growing a business.

a. Simplify in every direction. Eliminate programs, regulations and costs designed for 1950 as we look ahead to 2030, God willing.

b. Zero based budgets at the local, regional and state level. Model the choices to be made with 50% less tax income. Refine and improve. Repeat.

c. Benchmark with China, India, Austin TX, Ann Arbor, Boston and Raleigh – Durham.

Ai Wei Wei:

So you enjoyed 40 years of globalisation and the money China accumulated rises up like water. Their level is getting high. And the West is only realising it too late.” He chuckles. “History is a rollercoaster. Now you’ve passed your peak — enjoy going down. In 200 years, you will go up again.”

Bonus: Implement opportunities for all high school students to earn credit at UW System schools equivalent to the first two years of higher education.

Bonus 2: US debt Clock.

Supreme Court Decision PDF

An Arizona statute known as S. B. 1070 was enacted in 2010 to address pressing issues related to the large number of unlawful aliens in the State. The United States sought to enjoin the law as pre-empted. The

District Court issued a preliminary injunction preventing four of its provisions from taking effect. Section 3 makes failure to comply with federal alien-registration requirements a state misdemeanor; § 5(C) makes it a misdemeanor for an unauthorized alien to seek or engage in work in the State; § 6 authorizes state and local officers to arrest without a warrant a person “the officer has probable cause to believe . . . has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States”; and § 2(B) requires officers conducting a stop, detention, or arrest to make efforts, in some circumstances, to verify the person’s immigration status with the Federal Government. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, agreeing that the United States had established a likelihood of success on its pre-emption claims.

Held:

1. The Federal Government’s broad, undoubted power over immigration and alien status rests, in part, on its constitutional power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” Art. I, § 8, cl. 4, and on its inherent sovereign power to control and conduct foreign relations, see Toll v. Moreno, 458 U. S. 1, 10. Federal governance is extensive andcomplex. Among other things, federal law specifies categories of aliens who are ineligible to be admitted to the United States, 8 U. S. C. § 1182; requires aliens to register with the Federal Government and to carry proof of status, §§ 1304(e), 1306(a); imposes sanctions on employers who hire unauthorized workers, § 1324a; and specifies which aliens may be removed and the procedures for doing so, see § 1227. Removal is a civil matter, and one of its principal features is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials, who must decide whether to pursue removal at all. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for identifying, apprehending, and removing illegal aliens. It also operates the Law Enforcement Support Center, which provides immigration status information to federal, state, and local officials around the clock.

Pp. 394–398.

——-

Back in April 2000, under President Bill Clinton, federal agents stormed a home in Miami with guns drawn to seize six-year-old Elián González.

They sent the boy back to Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba, all in the name of diplomacy and following the rules.

Sarah Ravani

San Francisco schools dropped a controversial proposed overhaul last year of how students are assessed, called “Grading for Equity,” after parents, advocates and even the mayor slammed the proposal. 

The fight over “Grading for Equity” now is popping in the East Bay’s Tri-Valley school districts, where education officials have a plan to counter potential opposition: remove the word “equity” from their policies. 

The high-performing East Bay districts are adopting some of the core principles of the grading approach, which allows students multiple retakes, reduces how often zeros are given on tests and eliminates extra credit, among other changes — while scrubbing any mention of the word that has made the movement politically radioactive. Supporters say the intention of equity grading is to encourage students to focus more on learning and less on points. 

School districts in Dublin, Livermore, Pleasanton and San Ramon, which boast high graduation rates and above-average state test scores, have either rolled out or are considering reforms, but administrators say what they’re doing is “standards-based grading,” “mastery-based assessment” or “grade reform.” Not equity. 

Link:

I’m going to be fair to parents.

Most parents aren’t dumb. They can tell the system has problems. They know test scores aren’t great. They know teachers are stressed. They know kids are anxious.

But what most parents don’t realize is this:

It’s worse than you think. And it’s worse than you can imagine.

Parents assume when they drop their kids off, something like this happens:

• Their child gets meaningful instruction across the day
• Teachers can teach without their hands being tied
• Their kid is treated like an individual
• There’s order, structure, and accountability

THERE IS NONE OF THIS. ZERO. NADA.

Public schools prioritize compliance and avoiding legal issues above all. They are run like a giant HR department.

Walk through an average middle school or high school classroom today.

You’ll see kids sprawled on desks. Heads down. Talking while the teacher talks. Zero attention. Zero respect. The disrespect is normal now.

Steven Pinker: (2014)

The most-read article in the history of this magazine is not about war, politics, or great works of art. It’s about the admissions policies of a handful of elite universities, most prominently my employer, Harvard, which is figuratively and literally immolated on the cover. 

It’s not surprising that William Deresiewicz’s “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” has touched a nerve. Admission to the Ivies is increasingly seen as the bottleneck to a pipeline that feeds a trickle of young adults into the remaining lucrative sectors of our financialized, winner-take-all economy. And their capricious and opaque criteria have set off an arms race of credential mongering that is immiserating the teenagers and parents (in practice, mostly mothers) of the upper middle class.

Deresiewicz writes engagingly about the wacky ways of elite university admissions, and he deserves credit for opening a debate on policies which have been shrouded in Victorian daintiness and bureaucratic obfuscation. Unfortunately, his article is a poor foundation for diagnosing and treating the illness. Long on dogmatic assertion and short on objective analysis, the article is driven by a literarism which exalts bohemian authenticity over worldly success and analytical brainpower. And his grapeshot inflicts a lot of collateral damage while sparing the biggest pachyderms in the parlor. 

We can begin with his defamation of the students of elite universities. Like countless graybeards before him, Deresiewicz complains that the kids today are just no good: they are stunted, meek, empty, incurious zombies; faithful drudges; excellent sheep; and, in a flourish he uses twice, “out-of-touch, entitled little shits.” I have spent my career interacting with these students, and do not recognize the targets of this purple invective. Nor does Deresiewicz present any reason to believe that the 18-year-olds of today’s Ivies are more callow or unsure of their lives than the 18-year-olds of yesterday’s Ivies, the non-Ivies, or the country at large.

Aaron Sibarium

Amherst College appears to have laid off four administrators in the wake of a Washington Free Beacon report on the school’s sexually explicit orientation programming, according to two people familiar with the matter and a review of archived webpages. The school also announced that its vice president of communications would retire at the end of the school year. 

The administrators include Hayley Nicholas—the head of the college’s Queer Resource Center and its Women’s and Gender Center—as well as Jane Kungu, the head of the Multicultural Resource Center. They also include Assistant Director for Religious and Spiritual Life Shahar Colt and Class and Access Resource Center interim director Scarlet Im.

Some of the administrators were involved in planning Amherst’s “Voices of the Campus” event, during which students performed mock sex acts in the college’s main chapel. Others helped to organize a drag show with “queens” such as “Stanley Coochie.”

An Amherst spokeswoman, Caroline Hanna, denied that the administrators had been fired, claiming instead that “several positions were eliminated in Student Affairs as part of a long-planned divisional restructuring.” She declined to specify which positions were eliminated or to say why the college hadn’t announced the restructuring.

Arnold Kling:

As a student, you work with a mentor. At the beginning of each term, you and your mentor decide which courses you will take. If there are other students on campus taking them, great. If not, maybe you can take them with students at other schools, meeting remotely. 

For each course, an AI can design the syllabus. Tyler gave an example of a syllabus generated by ChatGPT for a course on Tudor England. If you can find a qualified teacher for that course, great. If not, you could try learning it from ChatGPT, which would provide lessons, conversations, and learning assessments (tests).

Tyler thinks that 1/3 of higher ed right now should consist of teaching students how to work with AI. I do that by assigning a vibe-coding project, and by encouraging “vibe reading” and “vibe writing.”

The reason for proposing such a high proportion of effort to learning to work with AI is because we are in a transition period, where the capabilities of AI are changing rapidly. Once capabilities settle down, best practices will become established, and knowledge of how to use AI will be ingrained. For now, it is very hard to keep up.

Hartzog, Woodrow and Silbey, Jessica M:

Civic institutions—the rule of law, universities, and a free press—are the backbone of democratic life. They are the mechanisms through which complex societies encourage cooperation and stability, while also adapting to changing circumstances. The real superpower of institutions is their ability to evolve and adapt within a hierarchy of authority and a framework for roles and rules while maintaining legitimacy in the knowledge produced and the actions taken. Purpose-driven institutions built around transparency, cooperation, and accountability empower individuals to take intellectual risks and challenge the status quo. This happens through the machinations of interpersonal relationships within those institutions, which broaden perspectives and strengthen shared commitment to civic goals.

Unfortunately, the affordances of AI systems extinguish these institutional features at every turn. In this essay, we make one simple point: AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other. These systems are anathema to the kind of evolution, transparency, cooperation, and accountability that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, current AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.

By Elizabeth Rembert, Amanda Albright and Marie Patino

The Big Take
Trinity Christian College, Siena Heights University and Sterling College couldn’t pull through.

In 2025, they succumbed to a fundamental problem killing colleges across the US: not enough students. The schools will award their final degrees this spring, stranding students not yet ready to graduate and forcing faculty and staff to hunt for new jobs.

David Bergh knows this pain all too well. He was the final president of Cazenovia College, which held its last, bittersweet graduation ceremony in 2023. Tucked in a small upstate New York town, Cazenovia survived the Civil War and the Great Depression but couldn’t overcome the one-two punch of falling enrollment and the Covid-19 pandemic. The school shuttered just shy of its bicentennial.

“Closing Cazenovia was an incredibly heartbreaking experience. It was torturous,” Bergh said. “And unfortunately, there will be more of it.”

Even before President Donald Trump launched his campaign against America’s colleges and universities, the industry faced an existential threat.

The country’s tumbling birth rate is pushing schools toward a “demographic cliff,” where a steadily dropping population of people in their late teens and early 20s will leave desks and classrooms empty. Many smaller, lesser-known schools like Cazenovia have already hit the precipice. They’re firing professors, paring back liberal arts courses in favor of STEM — or closing altogether.

———

Choose life.

Zach Goldberg & Eric Kaufmann

Results of a representative survey of more than 1,500 Americans aged 18 to 20 suggest that Critical Race Theory (CRT) and radical gender ideology, together known as Critical Social Justice (CSJ), is widespread in American schools. Ninety-three percent of American 18- to 20-year-olds said that they had heard about at least one of eight CSJ concepts from a teacher or other adult at school, including “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “patriarchy,” or the idea that gender is a choice unrelated to biological sex. Additionally, 90% of respondents had heard about at least one CRT concept and 74% about at least one radical gender concept.

CSJ appears to have a significant impact in shifting children to the political left.

In partisan terms, those exposed to no CSJ concepts break 27% to 20% for the Republican Party, while those who have been taught the maximum of eight CSJ concepts lean a whopping 53% to 7% toward the Democratic Party. In strongly Republican counties, young people taught no CSJ concepts lean Republican 38% to 20%, whereas in the same counties, those taught the maximum number of CSJ concepts lean Democratic by a stunning 46% to 14%. Parents also have less influence on their children than one might think. For instance, young people with…..

“Defiantly Free”

I’m talking about the Fourth Branch of government: the one you were never taught about in civics class. The one that doesn’t appear in any founding document. The one that now controls more wealth than most nations on Earth.

According to the Federal Reserve’s own data, nonprofit organizations in the United States now control $14.1 trillion in total assets.

Let that number wash over you.

$14.1 trillion.

That’s $4.0 trillion in real estate. $3.1 trillion in corporate equities. And here’s the part that should make your blood run cold: $3.6 trillion in assets that the Federal Reserve doesn’t even categorize. Three-point-six trillion dollars in something, and nobody is required to tell you what.

Janice Turner:

The man who meets me at his gated estate in the Portuguese countryside is 68 now, but seems calmer and healthier and has shed his Buddha-like bulk. “You know when a tree is in autumn, when the leaves come down,” he says, “it looks slimmer.” Ai moved here during lockdown, buying the holiday home of a wealthy lawyer, complete with a tennis court and pool he never uses. “I am old now,” he says, “I need sunshine.” Portugal provides it 300 days a year, unlike Berlin, where he lived for five years after leaving China and still has a studio, or Cambridge, where his 16-year-old son Ai Lao is at school.

Does he think westerners are softer? “Much, much! And getting weaker and weaker. We say in China it’s hard for three generations of a family to be wealthy. Because the third, they don’t even know what money means. It’s automatically in their accounts. So people become … a designer.” He laughs. “China became strong because people work hard with no holidays. Not just eight hours, but ten, twelve hours. That’s how they bring their children to your British schools, Cambridge and Oxford.” The West, he says, cannot take tuition fees from China and then moan when it tries to restrict academic freedom or complain about Chinese spying “because you’ve become the underdog. You cannot compete with China, so you blame it.”

“The media in the West also has strong, strong censorship. CNN or the BBC, it doesn’t matter. In China, the power is state power. But here it can be huge companies, business, even cultural institutions.”

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“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?

Pat Garrett:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is defending a Wisconsin mother after the School District of Pittsville, Wisconsin threatened her with a potential defamation lawsuit and police visited her home, based on her social media post. The letter from the lawyer representing the school district is an attempt to intimidate a parent for criticizing the school district and came after the parent posted online about what the mother saw as the exclusion of her disabled daughter at a school-sponsored music program.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Cory Brewer, stated, “This letter was outrageous. School district lawyers should know better than to threaten parents for raising concerns about their child’s education and treatment by the school. We will not tolerate intimidation tactics that chill free speech or attempt to silence families who are advocating for their children.”

Why This Isn’t Defamation: The school district through their legal counsel has not identified a single statement that this mother included in her post that could possibly meet the legal standard for defamation under Wisconsin law. As Wisconsin courts have made clear, defamation requires a false statement of fact, communicated to a third party, that is unprivileged and capable of defamatory meaning. Wagner v. Allen Media Broad., 2024 WI App 9, ¶ 21, 410 Wis. 2d 666, 685, 3 N.W.3d 758, 768. Criticism, opinion, and advocacy by parents do not meet that standard.

María Corina Machado

I’d say the answer can be found in the full text of what Machado said after the meeting. This has some historical heft that is missing from the CBS report above: “I presented the president of the United States the medal … the Nobel Peace Prize, and I told him, ‘Listen to this, 200 years ago, General Lafayette gave Simón Bolívar a medal with George Washington’s face on it’ as a symbol of the partnership between the people of the U.S. and the people of Venezuela and their shared fight for freedom against tyranny. And 200 years in history, the people of Bolívar are giving back to the heir of Washington a medal—in this case, the medal of the Nobel Peace Prize—as a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom / to our freedom.”

Mark Pulliam:

The signature policy of the Biden administration, and the one that was most opposed by the American public, was Biden’s disastrous opening of our southern border to countless millions of unvetted illegal aliens, including dangerous criminals, many of whom were transported and housed at extravagant expense using taxpayer funds. Biden abandoned border security, relocated Third World refugees en masse, and generally surrendered our national sovereignty. A nation without secure borders is not a nation. Biden’s reckless immigration policies took the nation to the brink of doom.

Americans were furious, especially since President Trump had managed to lock down our borders in his first term. Biden and his inept VP, Kamala Harris, claimed that border enforcement would be impossible without passing an amnesty bill.  This was a lie, and Americans knew it. So, President Trump was elected to a second term in 2024 based in large part on his vow to stop illegal immigrationand deport the millions of illegal aliens. Upon returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump 2.0 quickly shut down the flood of illegal immigration through tough border enforcement. Not a single illegal alien managed to cross the border, in contrast to the hordes welcomed by Biden-Harris. Americans were jubilant.

——-

Kat Rosenfield:

I’ve noted already that this cartoonish bad guy behavior feeds a sense that ICE is both illegitimate and not entirely real — people really do treat them like Star Wars stormtroopers whom they, the rebel hero, can freely antagonize while protected by good guy plot armor. But also—the complete lack of gravitas from the Trump/DHS/ICE camp is also, separately, just a massive communications failure.

Charles Homans:

There is the genuinely stunning fraud scandal, recently revealed, that happened on Walz’s watch. And there is the long shadow of George Floyd. But to understand both the crackdown and its stakes, it’s also worth revisiting a speech Trump gave in the city in November 2016, two days before the election that would first deliver him to the White House.

“Except the part where he says the fraud was “recently revealed” (with a link to a NYT story, as tho it’s not real until they report it)”

Let’s not forget that the Biden administration also sued Texas to stop them from securing the border

———

Amy Klobuchar in 2006 calling for ‘a fence’, accounting for inflation ‘a wall’ and ‘order at the border’

———-

In 2015, Barack Obama awarded Tom Homan the the Presidential Award for Service for Making America Safer at ICE…

———

Balaji:

(Side note: Democrats are historically much better at mass deportations than Republicans, as they take a whole-of-society approach to it, and persist with it over decades, and do it silently and nonviolently. That’s how Republicans were pushed out of university faculties, media companies, and California itself. It was once a dark red state, and now it’s deep blue.)

——-

The executive who oversees that team, along with a bunch of other DEI initiatives, is the Chief Equity officer, who makes a base salary — see pg. 8 here — of $357,000 a year. Here, watch her define the healthcare system’s most important goal, and notice that it isn’t “healing sick people,” which apparently is less important: “Nneka Sederstrom, the health system’s chief equity officer, said budget challenges put the hospital’s core mission of reducing health disparities at risk. The county declared racism as a public health crisis in 2020.” The healthcare system that treats racism as a medical problem now regards itself as a provider of total lifestyle support, not merely medicine, and provides benefits like this (see pg. 24): “Pre-packed bags of food available to patients at clinic visits.”

——

I served as a pastor there for 8 years. This is a normal Baptist Church. They worship Jesus. They love each other. They seek the good of their neighbors.

——-

My greatest analytical error was a failure to see that there would be little organized opposition to the Left. Only now have the first glimmers appeared (e.g., Kirk’s Turning Point USA, increasing radicalism among the young right). Hence the Left’s series of mind-blowing victories. The right’s weak institutional support means their occasional wins only slow the Left. Trump discovered this in his first term and is re-learning it in his second, hence the pivot to foreign affairs.

Karin Fisher:

Although it’s at the center of debates over transparency in foreign spending at American colleges, China ranks fourth in sources of overseas gifts and contracts, according to a new public database from the U.S. Department of Education. The largest donor country, Qatar, gave or awarded nearly $6.6 billion to higher-education institutions, $2.5 billion more than Chinese sources.

But Qatar is not among seven “countries of concern” that lawmakers, both in Congress and in the states, have sought to more strictly police. Neither are the two other countries that outpaced China in funding, Germany and England. Meanwhile, Iran and Russia, which are also considered adversarial nations, don’t crack the top 10.

China is the largest source of foreign funds for just one institution that ranks among the largest recipients of overseas funding — Columbia University.

Kayla Huynh:

A 1976 court order to desegregate Milwaukee Public Schools led to initial progress that has since faded.
Many Milwaukee schools remain racially segregated, with achievement gaps persisting between White and Black students.
Recent efforts to renew desegregation conversations have stalled due to a lack of funding and leadership changes.
Officials say lasting solutions require addressing broader issues and collaborating across sectors.

On Jan. 19, 1976, federal Judge John Reynolds ordered Milwaukee Public Schools to desegregate, in response to a lawsuit filed by lawyer and state Rep. Lloyd Barbee.

The ruling prompted sweeping changes to the city’s educational system. In the initial years under the court-ordered desegregation plan, schools made measurable progress.

But 50 years later, the promise of sustained integration has faded. Many of Milwaukee’s schools remain divided along racial lines, and achievement gaps between White and Black students persist.

Barbee, who died in 2002, was disappointed the mandate didn’t achieve lasting integration, recalled his daughter, Daphne Barbee-Wooten, a civil rights lawyer who edited a book of her father’s writings. Even so, she said, Barbee always held onto hope that his vision of an integrated school system in Milwaukee would one day be realized.

Richard P. Phelps:

US education policy research is dominated by copiously funded ‘strategic authors’ who utilize methods that showcase their work and suppress the work of others. Dismissive literature reviews declare that previous research is either nonexistent or no good and is not referenced. Citation cartels reference the research conducted among cartel members and ignore that conducted by others. Education journalists, the federal government, and wealthy foundations support this effort in information reduction. Adoption of the Common Core Standards serves as a case study of information narrowing on a grand scale.

“In normal science, a theory whose assumptions and predictions have been repeatedly contradicted by data will be discarded,” (Mark) Seidenberg, the cognitive neuroscientist, writes in his book “Language at the Speed of Sight.” “But in education they are theoretical zombies that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons such as empirical disconfirmation, leaving them free to roam the educational landscape.”

– Dyslexia and the Reading Wars: Proven methods for teaching the readers who struggle most have been known for decades. Why do we often fail to use them? by David Owen.

Mark Lilla:

It is that so many are learning nothing at all. And here he lays responsibility at the feet of the American educational establishment, which has, in the words of one scholar, been turning the “meat of academic subjects into meatloaf.”

One of the peculiarities of the American educational system, compared with those in other democracies, is that most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like “inquiry-based learning,” than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed.

In some places, fear of running afoul of politicized parents seems to have made some teachers gun shy about raising certain subjects. In Ron DeSantis’s Florida, Traub reports, parents at one Miami school received a notice that their first graders would need a signed permission slip to “participate and listen to a book written by an African American.”

In other states, too many teachers just seem to have abdicated their responsibilities out of despair, convinced that their students are no longer capable of reading whole books or remembering what they read. “History has been pushed to the side within social studies because there’s too much reading and writing,” as one frustrated teacher in Illinois puts it, on the verge of tears. “That creates too much stress, and it makes the kids feel bad about themselves.”

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“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?

Christopher Huffaker:

If you’re governor of the state that effectively introduced universal public school education in the United States, the one thing you want to avoid is losing the state’s ranking as having the smartest kids in the country.

Massachusetts is the richest, most highly educated state, where the nation’s first public school was founded and home to Horace Mann, the 19th-century reformer known as the Father of American Education. And, for the past two decades, governors could brag how students from Massachusetts have consistently beaten every other state on all four main tests on the Nation’s Report Card.

But now that perch atop the education hierarchy is in jeopardy, as the edge Massachusetts has long held over the nation is shrinking dramatically: Test scores have been sliding for nearly a decade and many students here have not recovered from the pandemic as much as in some other parts of the country.

Retraction Watch:

The retraction notice published today states first author Kevin Ng was responsible for the manipulation in the paper, including manipulated data in several figures. At the time of the experiments, Ng was a Ph.D. student at the Francis Crick Institute in London under the supervision of co-corresponding author George Kassiotis. 

According to Ng’s OrcID profile, he is now a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in New York. We were unable to find a current email address for him, and he did not respond to a message sent via Instagram. 

The Francis Crick Institute’s integrity team “was made aware of concerns” regarding the study after it was published, according to a statement sent to us by Kathryn Ingham, research communications and public affairs lead for the organization. Ingham declined to comment on the origins of the concerns. The corresponding authors on the article — Kassiotis, Charles Swanton, and Julian Downward, all affiliated with the Crick Institute — agreed with the retraction, according to the statement, which is now published online. 

The investigation found “no evidence of malpractice by other authors,” according to the Crick statement. The corresponding authors did not respond to our question on how the manipulation went unnoticed by the other 48 authors on the paper, and forwarded our request to Ingham.

Becky Jacobs:

A century later, WARF continues to license and patent campus discoveries, helping to bring research from UW-Madison to the world for commercial use. 

“Our mission has really kind of stood the test of time,” said Jeanine Burmania, the research foundation’s senior director of intellectual property and licensing. 

The nonprofit — which is separate, but partners with UW-Madison — has grown and evolved since its beginnings. Today, WARF manages more than 3,000 active technologies and over 670 commercial licenses, with a $3.29 billion investment portfolio.   

“WARF’s support has really been enormously valuable for UW-Madison, from investing in innovations that become spinoff companies, to creating pathways for promising new cancer treatments, to the support that we get every year,” Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said during a campus meeting in December. 

The organization is set to provide $206.9 million in total support to UW-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research this school year, including $50 million toward research projects and nearly $36 million for faculty, graduate students and staff. 

Ben:

This is part of where Delcy Rodriguez’s track record as a more pragmatic leader comes into play. It is funny that Venezuela is so deeply in the hole and screwed up that the massive improvement is that she’s hired economic consultants from Rafael Correa’s Ecuadorian government. He’s not exactly the gold standard for responsible management in the region, but in Venezuela “not totally insane management” would be a regime change of its own.

Zooming out and considering this in terms of the Trump-Monroe Doctrine, there may eventually be some payoff for the US in having more allies who can flood the world with cheap energy when we want them to. That’s supposed to be the deal with Saudi Arabia, but then they just didn’t do it when the Ukraine War broke out because of Biden/Kashoggi beefing.

I leave you with a profound irony, the kind that only geopolitics can provide. As Latin America freaks out about the first outbreak of open war between states in a very long time, we can recall that the most recent person to threaten this was… Nicolas Maduro. He planned to invade Guyana in 2023. Why? For oil.

Jared Walczak:

One particularly momentous policy choice has the potential to strip the founders of some of the world’s largest companies of their controlling interests and force them to sell off a significant portion of their shares. This could send stock prices plummeting to the detriment of tech employees and investors of all stripes, including ordinary workers whose 401(k)s would take a beating if Silicon Valley founders had to offload their shares in a hurry.

The poorly drafted initiative creates many scenarios in which tax liability would be vastly more than 5 percent of net worth, but this analysis focuses on six of them:

Valuation can be based on voting interests in a company when they exceed actual economic stakes.
Assessment rules for privately held businesses can substantially overvalue them.
Draconian underpayment penalties for taxpayers and potentially ruinous penalties for their appraisers encourage substantial overstatement of the value of privately held businesses to avoid a dispute with tax authorities.

Presumptive drafting errors on anti-avoidance rules result in taxing significantly more than the amount of the transfers.

Provisions regarding spousal assets and indebtedness to relatives would tax a nonresident spouse’s assets and, in the event of a divorce, would tax the California resident on formerly held assets that had been obligated to the ex-spouse in a divorce settlement.

Deferral regimes have eligibility limitations and impose additional costs, and run the risk of taxing wealth that might no longer exist.

——-

more.

Ann Althouse summary:

Students from both Madison East and West high schools have walked out to protest against ICE at the state Capitol.

I’d estimate there’s 200-300 students between the first floor rotunda and second floor bridges above pic.twitter.com/xnMjqEAsmo— A.J. Bayatpour (@AJBayatpour) January 14, 2026

———

more.

———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“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?

Sabine Martin:

WILL filed a similar complaint a year ago in January 2025, claiming UW-Madison had at least 60 race-based scholarships during the 2024-25 school year.

“For example, the Alliant Energy/Erroll V. David Achievement Award requires an undergraduate student to be ‘from one of the following underrepresented groups: African American, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian, Southeast Asian, or from a racial or ethnic group traditionally underrepresented in the field of engineering or business,’” the civil right complaint says.

UW-Madison has reviewed its scholarship distribution and uses a “pool and match” process to comply with the law, university spokesperson John Lucas said in a statement.

Through that process, the university offers a student funding based on “merit, need, major, GPA, or a variety of other non-identity based characteristics,” according to the UW-Madison website.

The Office for Civil Rights hasn’t notified UW-Madison of the complaint, but the university will cooperate with any review, Lucas said.

WILL:

During the 2024-25 school year, WILL discovered that UW-Madison offered at least 60 race-based scholarships to students, excluding many white and Asian students from even applying for these scholarships. To hold these actions accountable, WILL filed a federal civil rights complaint against UW-Madison in January 2025. In March 2025, the Trump Administration opened an investigation on UW-Madison’s race-based practices.

The following month, UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin, stated during a legislative hearing, “Nobody is getting a scholarship from UW Madison on the basis of the racial preference.” This is the same chancellor who authored a memo calling to rebrand DEI initiatives, later criticized by WILL.

Sloan Rachmuth:

This is a golden arrangement.

For North Carolina’s working and middle-class families, the cost of this arrangement is both direct and diffuse.

The most obvious impact is the inflated cost of care. Despite their tax benefits, nonprofit hospitals routinely charge commercial insurance plans, and their patients, the same, if not higher, prices than for-profit competitors. This drives up premiums and out-of-pocket costs, especially for families whose income disqualifies them from subsidies but cannot absorb $1,500 ER bills without financial strain.

The indirect burden is equally damaging. 

Every dollar these hospitals avoid in taxes is a dollar unavailable to counties and municipalities who maintain roads, fund schools, and staff police departments. When a hospital system sits tax-free on hundreds of millions in prime downtown property, the rest of the tax base picks up the slack.

In theory, the trade-off is justified: nonprofit hospitals are expected to provide charity care — free or reduced-cost services for those who can’t pay. In practice, many spend far less on such care than they receive in tax breaks. 

The result is a net outflow of public wealth into privately governed institutions with little oversight.

Librarian of Celaeno:

But what is more interesting to me than the specifics of this particular death are the circumstances surrounding it, the thought-world of the leftist agitators who seem so willing to risk their lives and safety to prevent the police from arresting criminals. It’s not surprising that a woman died, nor that the reaction was so strongly gender-coded. The anti-ICE protests have a strongly feminine character to them, and the widespread support for violence among liberal woman is manifestly the driving force behind them:

The refusal of liberals and the left to accept the results of legitimate elections and wage war on the will of the people despite claiming validation on exactly those grounds is simply another facet of the great post-Enlightenment war on civilization on the part of those who claim a mandate to remake society according to their notion of progress. This force is the most destructive in human history, an endless cycle of revolution and anarchy going back to 1789, with antecedents. It manifests in different modes in different places, according to the nature of those receptive to it, but everywhere bears the same character, a deadly and intractable pride rooted in a (and resulting in further) distortion of the soul, such that any connection to tradition and transcendence is rejected in favor of the imposition of theory by force of will.

Glenn Reynolds:

Here at home, leftists are trying to resurrect the Black Lives Matter strategy against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement — even  though black Americans are conspicuous by their absence this time around. 

Now, it’s mostly middle-aged white women eager to taunt, threaten and obstruct lawful enforcement raids targeting criminal illegal aliens. 

But the big news is that the raids are happening at all. 

We were told for decades that we couldn’t do anything about illegal immigration — at least not without a big pork-filled, amnesty-laden “bipartisan” bill. 

But now the border is basically closed, and those in the country illegally are being shipped out.

Crime in Washington, DC, Memphis, Tenn., and other cities was out of control. Trump sent in the National Guard to fix it. 

Sometimes the mere threat of sending the Guard was enough to get local authorities to fix crime problems for themselves — something they could have done all along, but mysteriously didn’t.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reported this week that up to 10% of the federal budget is lost to fraud annually.  

“Defender of the Republic:

For years, Americans have been told that NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) are benevolent, independent charities doing work the government “can’t.”

The truth is more complicated and more dangerous.

Many NGOs today function as unelected extensions of government power, funded by taxpayer money, shielded from transparency, and largely immune from voter accountability. When abused, this structure can exacerbate fraud, enable money laundering, and distort public policy all while appearing charitable on paper.

Now before you start questioning my reporting…isn’t about attacking charity.
It’s about exposing a systemic loophole that thrives in darkness.

An NGO is a private organization, usually structured as a nonprofit (often a 501(c)(3)), that is not part of government but frequently works with government.

Key characteristics:

• Not elected
• Not subject to voters
• Often tax-exempt
• Eligible for government grants and contracts
• Often shielded from public records laws

In theory, NGOs provide services.

In practice, many have become pass-through entitiesfor public money.

Fraud doesn’t require criminal masterminds.
It requires opacity + incentives + weak enforcement.

NGOs provide all three.

Samir Ruiz:

We discuss

• Why the NIH used to fund 60% of grant applications, and now funds just 10%
• How “soft money” forces researchers to fund their own salaries
• How distributing lots of small grants wastes everyone’s time
• How block grants could fund more breakthrough science
• Why researchers don’t get their first independent award until their mid-40s

Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood, Shadrach Strehle, and Jasper Placio for their support in producing this episode.

For a printable PDF of this interview, click here:

Chris Rickert:

The Madison School District will host three forums later this month to get public feedback on plans to rebuild two middle schools and a combined elementary and middle school.

The forums will take place in the existing schools’ buildings and run from 5:30 to 7 p.m.:

Orchard Ridge Elementary/Toki Middle School, 5602 Russett Road; Jan. 27 in the cafeteria

Cherokee Heights Middle School, 4301 Cherokee Drive; Jan. 28 in the library

Sennett Middle School, 502 Pflaum Road; Jan. 29 in the cafeteria

The schools make up Phase 2 of the district’s plans to rebuild or renovate 10 schools across seven sites — funded by a $507 million referendum voters approved in November 2024.

PAY ATTENTION WHEN YOUR TOWN KEEPS RAISING TAXES – Here is what may get their attention.😂😂

A town keeps raising taxes, so a resident shows up to speak, wearing an English lord’s wig. Instead of protesting, he sarcastically supports the increases and says, “If you can’t pay… pic.twitter.com/90T9ARx5li

— BelannF (@BelannF) January 14, 2026

——-

“The role of the commoners is to serve as Tax Milk Cows: to work and labor and toil at their dreary jobs to earn money to give to you.

Your role is to spend their money with wild abandon.”

——-

So…in case you missed it. The California State Auditor released their 2025 report. $281 Billion in Unemployment Fraud since the beginning of the pandemic. A $1 trillion dollar shortfall in funding the California pension system. The Governor’s office is refusing to release details on where the $25 billion in homeless spending went.

——

30 October 2025 Madison School Board approves a $668,000,000 budget for 25,557 “full time equivalent” students.

Via Rafael Gomez.

Perry Stein:

In April, Bondi rescinded a Biden-era policy that prevented officials from searching reporters’ phone records when trying to identify government personnel who have provided sensitive information to news organizations.

Bondi said in an internal memo at the time that the media should not be afforded such protections, noting leaks of government information during the Trump administration.

“This conduct is illegal and wrong and it must stop,” she wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.

But Bondi said that the Justice Department would search reporters’ communication records only when other investigative methods had been exhausted. The search warrant and seizures appeared to be Natanson’s first interaction with investigators.

——

grok summary of 1971, 2013 and more recent government searching reporters activity.

David Slichter

The rise of accountability programs was perhaps the most noticeable change in American education during the 1990s and early 2000s. We measure how these programs affected students’ long-run outcomes. We find increases in income, occupational skill level, and attainment, though the labor market effects are insignificant in most specifications. A typical accountability regime with high-stakes testing in seven grades increased attainment by 0.1 years. Last, the pattern of occupational skill usage does not support concerns about teaching to the test. Our results suggest that accountability was more likely beneficial than harmful for students’ human capital.

Erin Gretzinger:

Residents can stay updated on the referendum projects by checking the district’s dedicated website, Superintendent Joe Gothard said. The district recently hired a new member to its communications department who has a license to fly a drone, which Gothard said he hopes will help the district share progress on the projects as construction gets under way.

“The bottom line is, we just want to make sure that the questions that the community has, we have answers for,” Gothard told the School Board Monday. “If you’re hearing things, get them to the right people so that we can respond in a way that shows that commitment and earns that trust.”

———

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“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?

Joan Westenberg:

When you write a blog post, you’re creating a standalone document with a permanent URL. It exists at a specific address on the web, and that address doesn’t change based on who’s looking at it, when they’re looking at it, or what algorithm has decided they should see next. The post is there, stable, waiting for whoever wants to find it.

Compare this to a tweet (by God I’ll not call them “X’s”) or a Facebook post, which exists primarily as an item in a feed, algorithmically sorted, personalized to each viewer. Your post might appear at the top of someone’s feed for an hour and then disappear into an infinite scroll of other content, never to be seen again. The platform has no interest in whether your post is found next week or next year; it has a vested interest in keeping users scrolling through new content right now.

When I write a blog post, I’m writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they’re interested in this specific topic; I can assume a baseline of engagement; I can make my case over several thousand words, trusting that anyone who’s made it to paragraph twelve probably intends to make it to paragraph twenty.

When I write for social media, I’m writing for someone who is one thumb-flick away from a video of either a hate crime or a dog riding a skateboard. Everything I produce has to compete, in real-time, with everything else that could possibly occupy that user’s attention. The incentives push toward provocation and emotional activation. The format actively punishes nuance, which means that a thoughtful caveat reads as weakness and any acknowledgment of uncertainty looks like waffling.

Michael Moritz:

Meanwhile, public service workers gained more power in the mid-1970s when schoolteachers were granted the right to strike — followed, in 1977, by the rest of the workforce. Today, they are organised into 21 different bargaining units. Two examples of this concentration of power are the catastrophic 1999 legislative decision to give state employees a retroactive pension increase and the fact that 40 per cent of California’s General Fund must be spent on K-12 education — a tribute to the strength of the teachers’ union. Yet the standard of public education in California trails the national average.

In addition, the state is responsible for around $200bn of unfunded pension liabilities for state employees. Unlike their private sector counterparts, state employees don’t have to plan for their own retirement as their plans are guaranteed by the state. Those Californians without a retirement safety net are also on the hook for more than $85bn in associated retiree and health benefits for state workers. In 1961, the state contributed about $5 per employee per month to cover the same bills.

It would be one thing if, even with the highest taxes in the country, the state had delivered for its citizens — but it has failed on almost every count. California has the nation’s highest unemployment rate, its highest homeless population, its highest median housing prices, and its highest gas and electricity prices (save for Hawaii). Tragically, student tuition fees at what was once a beacon for public education, the University of California, Berkeley, have risen from about $1,000 a year in 1980 to about $17,500 today.

Anthony Man, Scott Travis

Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday excoriated the Broward School District for a “laundry list of failures” and suggested it’s been so impervious to reform that placing it in receivership might be an option to fix it.

“Honestly, it’s been a disaster. Let’s just be honest, it’s been a disaster in many different ways. It is really run more to benefit the entrenched interests, particularly the school unions, rather than the parents and the students,” DeSantis said at a news conference.

DeSantis said the School District is an entity that is impervious to reform efforts, and raised the possibility of drastic action by the state.

“But there’s a handful of spots around the state where, you know, maybe thrusting some of these entities into receivership may be the best way going forward. I think you could work things out pretty quickly, but I tell you it’s tough. It’s been really tough. And when people want to reform, you end up having, running into a brick wall. It’s been very difficult,” DeSantis said.

The governor made his comments in response to a question at a news conference at Broward College in Davie, where he and his appointees appeared to tout what they described as reductions in insurance premiums that would benefit homeowners.

Darel Paul:

Walz’s announcement marks a remarkable fall. A September 2025 YouGov poll ranked Walz fourth in Democratic voters’ willingness to support for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination, higher than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders. Five percent of Democrats even called Walz their “ideal choice,” a level surpassing former presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar. Walz was exceptionally busy last year keeping his name in the news and his face before activists. He spoke at the California and South Carolina Democratic Party annual conventions, held town hall events in Iowa, Nebraska, Texas, and Wisconsin, and attended a fund-raiser in Montana. He appeared on podcasts. He offered himself as the Democrats’ flag-bearer against Trump and Trumpism.

Yet it is clear now that seventy-nine-year-old Donald Trump will outlast sixty-one-year-old Tim Walz. The Minnesota governor’s political career fell victim to the follies and failings of contemporary American politics, shortcomings to which Walz himself contributed. The immediate cause of the governor’s downfall was, of course, a welfare fraud scandal that has cost the state and federal governments at least $1 billion with speculation that the tally could grow to a stunning $9 billion. That scandal highlights the central role that private nonprofits play in delivering public goods and services in America. The inability of the state government to prevent the fraud highlights the power that the NGO sector exercises in the contemporary Democratic Party. Yet Walz’s fall is not simply a story for the American left. It is also a tale of run-away partisanship and the cultural conquest of American politics by Walz’s nemesis. Tim Walz rose to prominence in 2024, after all, off his emulation of Donald Trump’s internet-friendly, insult-rich, profanity-laced attack-dog political style. Fighting fire with fire made Walz a beloved figure on the progressive left, but it also made him a singular target of the president and his supporters. Walz reveled in the national attention without measuring the cost of such relentless criticism, for it is precisely that white-hot spotlight which made the fraud scandal politically relevant and ended Walz’s career. 

Scott Johnson:

ITC appears to be organized as a 501(c)(4). Indivisible has organizational arms set up as a 501(c)(3), a (c)(4), and a PAC. The Indivisible Project appears to be Indivisible’s 501(c)(4) arm.

Back to Isabel Vincent: 

Indivisible is an offshoot of the Indivisible Project in Washington, DC, which bills itself as a movement to defeat the “Trump agenda,” and received $7,850,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations between 2018 and 2023, according to public records.

The controversial group was also behind recent pro-Venezuela protests and “No Kings” demonstrations against the Trump administration throughout the country last year.

Tahmineh

The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world.

Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life—speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival—under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime.

——

I grew up in Iran at the height of oppression. My world was ruled by fear, censorship, and silence. @jk_rowling books showed me a universe where courage beat fear. That kind of storytelling saves minds and lives in ways people in free countries rarely understand.

——-

Ex-Minneapolis officer who killed Justine Damond sentenced to 12.5 years

——

And I like the NYT’s correction at the bottom: “An earlier version of this article misstated how much consumers spent on beef tallow in 2025. It was $9.9 million, not $900 million.” That’s kind of a never mind correction. They wrote this whole article about the hot new business that is beef tallow and then it turned out to be on 1.1% of what they thought it was!

Chris Rickert:

Madison’s four main public high schools have been honored for their students’ high rates of participation and success in Advanced Placement courses, the Madison School District announced Tuesday.

The College Board, which administers AP programs nationally, named West, East, La Follette and Memorial high schools to its “honor roll” based on the percentage of seniors who took at least one AP exam, earned a score of 3 or higher on an AP exam, and took five or more AP exams during high school, including at least one in ninth or 10th grade.

“This is a meaningful milestone for our district,” Tim Peterson, district director of assessment, said in a news release. “Having all four comprehensive high schools earn a place on the AP School Honor Roll at the same time speaks to years of intentional work to expand access, encourage participation and support students once they’re enrolled in these courses.”

…

More than 2,000 students completed more than 4,500 AP exams districtwide last spring, the district said in the news release. More than 80% of those exams received a score of 3 or higher on a 5-point scale, it said.

Scott Johnson:

Dr. Sidney Bondurant has written to provide relevant background to “The supremacy of Mississippi.” Dr. Bondurant writes:

I read your Power Line post on Mississippi’s Literacy Based Promotion Act and the progress made in reading and math in our elementary schools. This act was passed during the administration of Governor Phil Bryant. I was Governor Bryant’s legislative liaison at this time. Laurie Todd-Smith, Ph.D., was the governor’s education policy advisor and we were the two primary “lobbyists” for the governor at the state legislature. Laurie is now working in the Trump Administration and I am retired. Governor Bryant now heads up a business development firm and I serve as a consultant to that firm.

It was not an easy sell. But most of the opposition came from the Democrats and not the Republicans. The public school lobby (district school superintendents, “The Parents Campaign,” the teachers’ union, and the mainstream media) fought against us vigorously. Black Democrats were the most vigorous. One told me that he automatically suspected that any proposal affecting public schools from white Republicans had some nefarious purpose. Charges of RACISM! were shouted on the House floor. I was told by one of those against the bill that I was trying to hold back black third grade kids to punish them. When I tried to explain that the retention part of the bill was to provide intensive help to those kids so that they had a better shot at success he would not believe me.

On final passage in the 122-member House there were 16 NO votes, all Black Democrats except for one white Democrat and two white Republicans. There were several Black Democrats who did vote for it here).

I told Governor Bryant when he signed the bill that I thought that act would be the most significant of his administration. The improvement in the education of Mississippi’s citizens will lead to economic benefits for the state and its citizens that will bring about the most positive changes since the Civil War.

Thank you for bringing attention about this subject to your readers.

Yours truly,

Sidney Bondurant, M.D.

——-

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“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?

Jeffrey T. Denning∗ Rachel Nesbit† Nolan Pope‡ Merrill Warnick:

Average grades continue to rise in the United States, prompting discussion about the pos-sibility of grade inflation. However, we know very little about the consequences of gradingstandards for students. We study how grade inflating teachers affect students. First, we extend,develop, and validate teacher-level measures of grade inflation. We construct two measures ofgrade inflation, one that measures average grade inflation and another that measures whetherteachers are more likely to give a passing grade. These measures pass forecast bias tests com-mon in the teacher effects literature. We show that grade inflation is distinct from teachervalue-added, with grade inflating teachers having moderately lower cognitive value-added andslightly higher noncognitive value-added. Next, we consider the effects of grade inflation onfuture outcomes. Passing grade inflation reduces the likelihood of being held back, increaseshigh school graduation, and increases initial enrollment in two-year colleges. Mean gradeinflation reduces future test scores, reduces the likelihood of graduating from high school,reduces college enrollment, and ultimately reduces earnings.

Next, we consider the effects of grade inflation on future outcomes. Passing grade inflation reduces the likelihood of being held back, increases high school graduation, and increases initial enrollment in two-year colleges. Mean grade inflation reduces future test scores, reduces the likelihood of graduating from high school, reduces college enrollment, and ultimately reduces earnings.

——-1

More.

Nathaniel Hansford Last

There has been much discussion over the last 5 years on an alleged reading crisis in the United States and the western world (Hanford, 2022). The argument has essentially been that reading achievement scores are falling and that Balanced Literacy is to blame (Hanford, 2022). However, in my opinion the state of Math instruction and test scores is actually far, far worse. In this article, I will review the evidence that there is a systemic problem with Math Achievement.

The Decline

When the power goes out, stores close. It’s not because the lights go out. It’s because the average cashier can no longer calculate how much change to give, without the computer. This is not an isolated problem or weird quirk of our modern times; it’s a phenomenon that reflects a decline in overall Math ability.

———

2014: 21% of University of Wisconsin System Freshman Require Remedial Math

How One Woman Rewrote Math in Corvallis

Singapore Math

Discovery Math

Connected Math (2006!)

Math Forum 2007

Washington Post:

The Supreme Court has the chance this week to save women’s sports, allowing states to restore a level playing field for girls by excluding biological men and thereby correcting one of the worst excesses of America’s cultural revolution.

Sarah Mervosh

Kindergartners arrived not knowing their letters from their numbers. After a few years in school, they were still far behind. A decade ago, just 12 percent of Hazlehurst students were reading on grade level.

Today, Hazlehurst has clawed that figure to 35 percent. And Mississippi has emerged as one of the best places in the country for a poor child to get an education.

Mississippi has gone from 49th in the country on national tests in 2013, to a top 10 state for fourth graders learning to read — even as test scores have fallen almost everywhere else.

Poverty remains a driving factor in student achievement, and wealthy states like Massachusetts still have the highest share of students proficient in reading and math.

But adjusted for poverty and other student demographics, Mississippi is No. 1 for fourth grade reading and math, and at or near the top in eighth grade, according to the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

“If you want to ask the question, ‘Which states are helping kids coming from difficult circumstances learn as much as they can?’ Mississippi is now doing much better than many other states, including wealthier states in affluent progressive areas,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right think tank.

Mississippi’s gains have been confined mostly to the early years, where the state has focused its efforts. The system revolves around standardized testing, and the gains have not always persisted. By raw scores, Mississippi eighth graders still rank 41st on national tests for reading, and 35th for math.

Yet Mississippi has figured out something almost no other state has, and it has involved far more than just changing the way reading is taught, the most common explanation for its success.

Even as schools elsewhere have focused on issues like school funding, social justice and mental health in recent years, Mississippi schools like Hazlehurst have made academics their North Star.

———-

meanwhile:

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“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?

Becky Jacobs:

Students are on track to take classes in a new humanities building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this fall. And the athletics department plans to finish an indoor football practice facility next to Camp Randall Stadium this summer.

As those two projects wrap up in 2026, Wisconsin’s flagship public university also plans to break ground on a visitor and education center at the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, near Picnic Point.

Here are details about what campus and community members can expect from the new buildings:

HHS:

In the latest development of Operation Nightingale—a scheme that created an illegal licensing and employment shortcut for aspiring nurses—fraud-related charges have been filed against 12 defendants for their roles in selling fraudulent nursing diplomas and transcripts. In Phase I of Operation Nightingale, 30 defendants were charged and convicted by plea or at trial in 2023. According to court records, the defendants conspired to sell false nursing credentials—diplomas and transcripts fraudulently obtained from Florida-based nursing schools—to aspiring Registered Nurse (RN) and Licensed Nurse Practioner/Vocational Nurse (LPN/VN) candidates. Purchasers of the bogus documents used them to qualify for the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX), commonly known as the nursing board exam. Candidates who passed the exam became eligible for licensure in various states, and once licensed, obtained employment as nurses across the United States.

Abdoulaye Ndiaye:

This article is for undergraduate, master’s, and early-career professionals who regularly contact me for career advice about:

• What do economists do?
•  Is a PhD worth it?
• How do you prepare and apply?

Most of these students are first-generation students seeking answers to the above questions, career advice, or mentoring. However, I am unable to respond personally to all of their individual inquiries, so I decided to address many of these common questions in this article. In this piece, I will focus more on applying and preparing for a PhD in Economics.

Corrinne Hess:

Ploeger was removed from her position following Gilkey-Meisegeier’s arrest.

Sun Prairie Police Chief Kevin Warych said an incident in April involving Gilkey-Meisegeier and a student resulted in the dean being placed on administrative leave. But the allegations were not reported to either the Sun Prairie Police Department or the Dane County Child Protective Services as mandatory reporting laws require.

Another incident involving a different Sun Prairie School District staff member was also not reported by Ploeger, Warych said.

“Protecting children is not a priority, but it is our duty. It is the foundation of our work,” Warych said.

Ploeger’s attorney, Jason Luczak, preempted the announcement with a 2 p.m. press conference in Milwaukee. Ploeger was not in attendance.

“Her heart was always in the right place, and she was always trying to do the right thing for the children and trying to manage the situation,” Luczak said. “And frankly, there was no intent she had to protect someone. Her biggest priority has been to protect kids.”

Michael Kovrig:

After 1,800 days in mostly solitary confinement, the iconic voice for free speech faces more years as a political prisoner—unless advocacy and pressure can bring clemency

Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai has been found guilty of “foreign collusion” and “sedition” after a national security trial that dragged on for more than two years. A mitigation hearing is scheduled for January 12; sentencing will follow, with life imprisonment possible. The New York Times, BBC, SCMP, and other media have extensive features on Lai this week.

DataRepublican (small r)

All long-lasting institutions drift toward it. Systems seek equilibrium and optimize for survival. Over time, survival becomes flattened as preserving internal coherence rather than fulfilling an external purpose. Once that happens, the institution closes itself off from external falsification.

The system no longer asks, Is this true? It asks, Is this compatible with what we already produce?

The current unrest in Minnesota is an example of an order that has reached equilibrium through mutual dependency between antagonistic subsystems.

After the Cold War, the Western world organized itself around a single moral injunction: Never again. Never again fascism. Never again totalitarianism. Never again a unified ideology capable of subordinating it to a single vision of man.

To prevent another Nazi Germany or another Soviet Union, the post–Cold War order built immunity to totalitarian ideologies.

Grand narratives were treated as dangerous. Politics was re-engineered away from totalizing visions and towards norms and institutional mediation.

For a time, this worked.

Maya Tekeli and Jeffrey Gettleman

Danish doctors put intrauterine devices into Greenlandic girls as young as 12 without their consent or knowledge. Some women were given injections that they claim left them infertile for life. When victims complained about severe pain, doctors refused to help, leading some to remove the IUDs themselves.

These were among the findings from a scathing report, released Tuesday, on Denmark’s past policy of forcing contraception on women and girls in Greenland, a practice that Danish officials now admit was wrong.

The report was based on personal testimonies, medical records and historical documents. Of 410 cases described in detail, 349 involved health complications.

Denmark colonized Greenland more than three centuries ago, and the gigantic island in the Arctic Ocean remains a Danish overseas territory. In the 1960s and 1970s, and to a lesser degree in the decades that followed, Danish doctors implanted IUDs in thousands of Greenlandic women and girls, in many cases without their permission.

Andrew Michta:

How did we get here? Simply put, our political class failed to appreciate why the United States triumphed over the Soviet Union. We won not because of the power of liberal ideals—though they were important additional enablers of American foreign and security policy against the Soviets—but because in 1947, when the Cold War competition was fully joined, our country possessed a massive industrial base, the global reserve currency, the largest gold reserves, half of global GDP, a navy larger than all the world’s navies combined, an expanding population and rapidly growing middle class, and a monopoly on atomic weapons.

True, over the course of the Cold War competition between the United States and the Soviet Union (the latter for a period aligned with communist China), the balance began to shift somewhat. The economies of war-ravaged Europe and Asia recovered, and the relative power position of the United States would never approximate where the country was in 1947. Nonetheless, there was little question that in terms of the power indices of the era, America had an unmatched edge in every aspect of technology, research and development, manufacturing, and overall wealth when compared to its adversary. Few in the captive nations of Eastern Europe doubted that American free-market capitalism, and what the West represented more generally, was superior when it came to both wealth and freedom. What kept them mouthing communist slogans was the reality of being occupied by the Red Army and dragooned into the Warsaw Pact against the very America (and West) they admired. But we won largely because America’s hard power was undergirded by our unmatched industrial base and R&D institutions.

Yet we failed to grasp that the Soviet Union did not implode because the liberal democratic ideal overpowered the tenets of communism. Few argued at the time that we had won because our adversary could not match our industrial base and innovative research universities and labs—especially as we moved into the digital age—and that henceforth it should be the government’s sacred duty to preserve and protect advantages that took generations to build. The implosion of the Soviet empire was greeted by Washington’s intelligentsia as an ideological triumph par excellence. In a bizarre replay of the Bolshevist fiction about the universality of Marxist dogma, our elites post-1990 seemed certain that a new globalist age had dawned in which America’s sui generis history and political tradition would first claim a universal quality and ultimately dissolve in the new global order. At think tank conferences, political science conventions, and increasingly in government and Congress, our elites succumbed to the temptation to view 1990 not as marking the end of a long twilight struggle in which the nation’s industrial base and military alliances had ultimately carried the day, but rather as the culmination of an inexorable drive toward the fulfillment of a grand universalist promise. Francis Fukuyama’s thesis was transformed into the equivalent of now-discarded communist teleological reasoning, only this time built on liberal clichés, not Marxian canon.

J.D. Tuccille:

On November 3 of last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) proposed a rule change allowing its agents to gather and store more biometric data on anybody associated with applications for “benefits” including family visas, Permanent Resident (green) Cards, and work permits. The DHS summary of the rule states, in part:

DHS proposes to require submission of biometrics by any individual, regardless of age, filing or associated with an immigration benefit request, other request, or collection of information, unless exempted; expand biometrics collection authority upon alien arrest; define “biometrics;” codify reuse requirements; codify and expand DNA testing, use and storage; establish an “extraordinary circumstances” standard to excuse a failure to appear at a biometric services appointment…

According to the proposal, the purpose of gathering biometric data, including fingerprints, photographs, signatures, voice prints, ocular images, and DNA (which is heavily emphasized by DHS) is “identity management” to verify that people are who they say they are.

Tyler Cowen:

First, I gave a talk at University of Austin and also had some meetings there, including with students.  My talk was a practical guide on how to use AI to offer courses that a college or university otherwise cannot afford (especially important for smaller institutions).  I believe they will be putting it online.

My general sense was that U. Austin undergraduates are on a par with undergraduates at top five schools.  I do not think on the technical side they would compete with Stanford or MIT, but more generally…they were very impressive and asked excellent questions with real curiosity.  And seemed politically saner than typical Ivy League cohorts, though without being “mono” in any particular direction.  Here is Arnold Kling on UATX and its students.

Rahm Emanuel:

Mississippi went from 49th to 9th in their reading scores – known as the “Mississippi Miracle.” Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama adopted the same (phonics) model and are seeing similar gains for their kids. It works. What are we waiting for?

We need the courage to stand by our kids. China is not holding back America’s kids. That’s on all of us. It’s time to put American children first.

———

meanwhile:

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“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?

Alexander Shut:

Madison and its former city clerk are arguing in court that they can’t be sued for failing to count 193 absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election, in part because a Wisconsin law calls absentee voting a privilege, not a constitutional right.

That legal argument raises questions about how much protection absentee voters have against the risk of disenfranchisement — and could reignite a recent debate over whether the law calling absentee voting a privilege is itself unconstitutional.

That law, which appears to be uncommon outside of Wisconsin, has been cited repeatedly in recent years in attempts to impose more requirements and restrictions on absentee voting, and, at times, disqualify absentee ballots on which the voters have made errors. It does not appear to have been invoked to absolve election officials for errors in handling correctly cast ballots.

Nonetheless, the law has become central to the defense presented by Madison and its former clerk, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, in a novel lawsuitseeking monetary damages on behalf of the voters whose ballots went missing.

The suit, filed by the law firm Law Forward, names the city and the clerk’s office as defendants, along with Witzel-Behl and Deputy Clerk Jim Verbick in their personal capacities, and cites a series of errors after the 2024 election that led to the ballots not being counted in alleging that they violated voters’ constitutional rights.

In defending against that claim, attorneys for Witzel-Behl argued in a court filing that by choosing to vote absentee, the 193 disenfranchised voters “exercised a privilege rather than a constitutional right.”

Juan Siliezar,

A new study from researchers at the Brown University School of Public Health highlights a push from private equity investors into autism therapy centers across the nation.

Private equity firms acquired more than 500 autism therapy centers across the U.S. over the past decade, with nearly 80% of acquisitions occurring over a four-year span.

That’s according to a new study from researchers at Brown University’s Center for Advancing Health Policy through Research.

Study author Yashaswini Singh, a health economist at Brown’s School of Public Health, said the work highlights how financial firms are rapidly moving into a sensitive area of health care with little public scrutiny or data on where this is happening or why.

“The big takeaway is that there is yet another segment of health care that has emerged as potentially profitable to private equity investors, and it is very distinct from where we have traditionally known investors to go, so the potential for harm can be a lot more serious,” Singh said. “We’re also dealing with children who are largely insured by Medicaid programs, so if private equity increases the intensity of care, what we’re looking at are impacts to state Medicaid budgets down the road.”

Washington Post:

If the union really cares about justice, it should focus on teaching students how to read and write.

Usually New Year’s resolutions are a chance to ditch bad habits and make a change for the better, but the Chicago’s Teachers Union (CTU) is choosing to buck that convention as they resolve to more of the same in 2026. The union posted this week on social media that its resolution is to “speak truth to power” and committed to “defending Black and brown and immigrant communities who are targeted by federal agents,” as well as “fighting back against an administration trying to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and roll back civil rights protections.”

Those are lofty goals in a school district that can hardly teach kids to read and write. In 2025, 43 percent of Chicago’s third through eighth grade students were reading at grade level. Only 27 percent were proficient in math. Those are fundamental deficits that haunt kids into high school. In 11th grade, only 40 percent were proficient in reading and 25 percent in math on the ACT.

It’s hard to believe the union has students’ best interests at heart when its bosses continue to ignore the biggest problems. Poor test scores endure despite lower standards. Last summer, the state of Illinois lowered proficiency benchmarks on reading and math scores.

Effective instruction starts by showing up. For the fourth year in a row, chronic absenteeism among students stayed stuck near 40 percent, about 16 points higher than in 2019. Teachers are also playing hooky, with about 43 percent of educators missing 10 or more days of school, compared to 34 percent statewide. Teacher absences are a top predictor of student success.

Chad Aldeman:

Texas’ Alpha school combines AI with content mastery and innovative approaches to motivating students. It could be a model worth studying.

I spend my time looking at ways to improve public schools. So why have I been fascinated by a private school charging $40,000 a year in tuition? 

The AI-fueled Alpha program claims its students grow academically more than twice as fast as the national average, with only two hours of learning per day. Initially, I was skeptical. But after I read a parent review and a profile of school founder Mackenzie Price and principal Joe Liemandt, and listened to Liemandt on podcasts, I was intrigued both as a parent and as an education policy wonk. 

Alpha started as a small private school in Austin, Texas, in 2014 but now operates a growing network of 18 locations. Its AI tools are also in use in specialized gifted and talented programs, sports academies and a Montessori-like elementary school. As the network grew, it drew the attention of Liemandt, an Austin tech billionaire, who not only decided to send his kids there but stepped away from the industry, became the school’s leader and now says he plans to spend $1 billion to transform education. 

How? Mainly through its technology-enabled, personalized “two-hour learning” model. Alpha points to NWEA MAP Growth gains that are, on average, 2.6 times as large as other similarly scoring students make. In 2024-25 for example, the main Alpha campus had, depending on the grade level, 67% to 90% of students meeting their growth targets in math and 65% to 100% of students meeting their targets in English. 

Pieter Snepvangers:

People hated that four letter word’: Middlesbrough’s anger as Labour scraps Eton-backed free school

Scheme to help brightest children from deprived backgrounds scuppered by ‘socialist ideology’

They call Brian Sexton’s grandson the “talking calculator”. He is only nine years old, but his family takes it in turns to quiz him and watch and admire as he turns out the correct answers.

“He can do the square roots of any number you like,” Sexton beams. “He can multiply 117 by 144 by building the blocks in his head and then counting them back. Genius.”

Until last month, his family dreamt that he might one day go to Eton’s free sixth form college that was poised to open in the heart of Middlesbrough.

The proposed school, which was fronted by Eton College and Star Academies, a multi-academy trust, was expected to enrol 480 of the brightest pupils from deprived backgrounds and offer them a world-class education for free.

Although the school was approved in 2023 by the previous government and set to welcome its first 240 pupils last September, Labour entered office and immediately paused plans while it carried out a review.

Charles Murray

I recently published an autobiographical book, Taking Religion Seriously, about my decades-long evolution from agnosticism to eccentric Christianity. One of the many beliefs that I acquired during that evolution—to my surprise—is that I should not decide when to end my life. It was surprising because for years I not only approved of assisted suicide but was ready to take advantage of it myself. Since early in our marriage, I had an ongoing joke with my wife about her responsibility if I got old and was mentally losing it: She was supposed to know when the time had come to “put the white powder in my gin.” Suicide properly done, with help if necessary, seemed to me a good thing.

Now, when I read that New York will legalize assisted suicide, I am of two minds. As a policy analyst, I admire the bill that Governor Hochul will sign. It requires evidence of mental competence and voluntary initiative. It is limited to people with a clinically diagnosed disorder that gives them fewer than six months to live. The law requires that the person put the pill or potion in his or her own mouth and swallow it unassisted. 

As policy, it’s about as well crafted as such a law can be. As an option for me, no thanks. I’m going to stick it out.

Why? My answer is personal, but, writing as someone turning 83, facing death in a comparatively few years, I hope that it might also be useful to others.

Washington Post:

That’s a bold claim by the prosecutor. Political speech — including speech about elections, no matter how odious — is strongly protected by the First Amendment. It’s not unusual for politicians to take factual liberties. The main check on such misdirection is public scrutiny, not criminal prosecution.

Of course fraud is a crime. But that almost always involves dissembling for money, not political advantage. Smith’s attempt to distinguish speech that targets “a lawful government function” doesn’t work. Most political speech is aimed at influencing government functions.

Smith might think his First Amendment exception applies only to brazen and destructive falsehoods like the ones Trump told after losing the 2020 election. But once an exception is created to the First Amendment, it will inevitably be exploited by prosecutors with different priorities. Imagine what kind of oppositional speech the Trump Justice Department would claim belongs in Smith’s unprotected category.

Smith also said he makes “no apologies” for the gag order he tried to impose on Trump during the prosecution. The decision to criminally charge a leading presidential candidate meant the charges would feature in the 2024 campaign. Yet Smith fought to broadly limit Trump’s ability to criticize him or the prosecution in general, claiming such statements would interfere with the legal process.

Erin Gretzinger:

A proposed independent charter school in Madison has passed the first stage of the approval process to apply for charter status with the Universities of Wisconsin’s Office for Educational Opportunity, which has authorityunder state law to authorize and oversee new charter schools in the state

North Star Preparatory is seeking to provide a tuition-free high school that would be based on Madison’s north side. The school would serve students in 9th through 12th grade.

The school has until Jan. 12 to submit an application to begin the second phase of the approval process, according to Mark Pitsch, a Universities of Wisconsin spokesperson. Pitsch said the Office for Educational Opportunity hadn’t received the school’s application as of Thursday.

North Star Prep seeks to “promote punctual graduation, enhance engagement and develop career and community readiness,” according to its website. 

“Our mission is to reignite students’ passion for education by offering personalized, career-focused learning experiences that inspire, build skills and foster resilience,” the website says. “We are dedicated to providing the tools, support and guidance needed for all students to achieve on-time graduation and confidently pursue their future careers.”

While a board of directors page on the website says its members are “coming soon,” recent board meeting minutes list Nikole Sconiers, Rea Solomon and Kate Maselter as the founding members of North Star Prep.

———

Charters that operate outside of the taxpayer funded Madison K-12 system are not subject to its governance practices. The Madison school board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory IB charter school in 2011….

———-

meanwhile:

8,897 (!) Madison 4k to 3rd grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group during the 2024-2025 school year.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $26,000 per student) K-12 tax & spending practices. This, despite long term, disastrous reading results. 

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

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

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

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

“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?

heritage:

The family is the foundation of civilization, and marriage—the committed union of one man and one woman—is its cornerstone.

As the most essential institution in society, every good thing in society flows from the family. Getting married, starting a family, and building a legacy are not just personal choices. They are the American Dream. The natural family—virtuous, faithful, and growing—is the center of American life. Stay-at-home moms are heroes, and involved fathers are vital. Both shape tomorrow’s leaders.

The weakening of the family as the cornerstone of our country has led to a loneliness, commitment, and demographic crisis that endangers both the American Dream and America’s place in the world. Conservatives can no longer stand by as the American family breaks down. We must propose bold, novel policy solutions that encourage family formation. Marriage and parenthood should not just be possible but should be desirable again. We seek an America where a husband, his wife, and their children are protected by law, encouraged by government, and supported by societal institutions so that they may prosper in peace and security, and pass on our heritage to subsequent generations.

More.

Matt Stoller:

A few days ago, Hunterbrook, a short-seller funded media outfit, released an investigative report showing what looks like a multi-billion dollar money laundering operation by the three largest health insurance companies. The allegation is that CVS, UnitedHealth Group, and Cigna are supposed to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices for their patients. But instead, they collude with those pharmaceutical companies to force higher drug prices, and split the profits with them. It’s not a new charge. The Federal Trade Commission included this alleged scam in its complaint filed against these companies in September of 2024.