School Information System

Corrinne Hess

When Brad Cortright opened his property tax bill this month, he saw the same thing most Wisconsin homeowners are experiencing: A big jump. 

Cortright’s taxes on his Wauwatosa home are up $2,400. 

“It’s not quite 50 percent, but it’s a lot,” Cortright said. “I think what happened to us was we didn’t get increased as much as we should have the previous cycle, and it caught up with us this cycle.” 

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

A report released Tuesday from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found gross K-12 school property taxes rose an average of 7.8 percent in December, the largest increase in three decades. 

That’s because of local referenda and increases to per-pupil revenue limits in the last two years, according to the report. 

County property taxes are set to rise 3.1 percent, an increase more in line with recent years. 

As a result, tax levies for all local governments are expected to see their largest increase since at least 2018.

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“Madison school district’s property tax increase accounts for 17% of the rise in total tax levies for K-12 schools statewide”

Madison’s k-12 property tax burden, which, according to District budget documents is $478,683,790, up 19.48% from 2024-2025 and 32% from 2022-2023

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more.

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Shadow Robin Vos:

The damage control on Evers 400 year veto is crazy.

Here are the facts:

-Evers extended revenue limits for 400 years or $325/pupil/year
-Districts can then increasing spending up to that limit WITHOUT a referendum
-Defacto indexing of property taxes into perpetuity without voter approval (unless exceeding limits)
-Without the 400 year veto, future increases would be accountable to voters via referendum.

My assumption is he did this to be in the union’s good graces after signing the largest increase in choice spending since its inception.

Bottom line is that he gloated and thought he was so cool (pic for context) for giving the authority to raise taxes for 400 years.

Maybe rethink that line item veto and bragging about it if you don’t want property tax hikes on democrats.

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Patrick McIlheran:

Sixty-nine percent of Madison school district voters said, “Tax me harder, daddy!”

One hundred percent of them are suffering the consequences.

madison.com/news/local/gov… via

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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?

Saloni Dattani: 

Until a few years ago, I thought data visualization wasn’t very interesting. At best, it was a nice bonus in my work. I preferred writing because I found it gave me the space to get across the details and clarifications that people would often miss on a flashy chart.

Anyway, most data visualizations I had come across were not very good. A lot of graphs were (and still are) confusing, misleading, or overly simplistic. I’ve seen quite a lot – three dimensional bar charts, double-axis charts with completely different scales for the same metric, unitless charts, pizza slice charts with sizes that corresponded to nothing in the data. Even now I come across charts that are ugly in such novel ways that I wonder how much imagination it must have taken to create them.

Chris Rickert:

Most public-school districts in Dane County already have policies to restrict cellphone use in class, but Madison is somewhat unusual among them in having policies specific to individual schools.

In general, Madison middle schoolers’ cellphones must be “off and away” or “out of sight” during school hours. High schoolers have more leeway; most are allowed to use their phones during non-instructional time.

School district data and other research have repeatedly shown a tendency, nationwide, to discipline Black students and students receiving special education services at rates higher than their classmates.

To avoid such disparities in the enforcement of the cellphone ban, the district says the UW team will look at existing data on discipline related to cellphone use in schools to “establish a historical equity baseline, enabling the team to set measurable goals to reduce or eliminate racial disparities in disciplinary actions under the new policy.”

Washington Post:

Chicago has long-term structural problems with its finances, thanks in large part to wildly underfunded pensions. The country’s third-largest city has a history of using short-term gimmicks to paper over its problems, such as a notorious 2008 deal that sold off 75 years of future parking meter revenue for $1.15 billion, which was quickly spent. That deal is still hurting finances today, which should have taught local politicians that there is no substitute for serious fiscal reform. Alas, apparently not.

The city’s net operating budget increased almost 40 percent between 2019 and 2025, “subsidized in large part by temporary federal pandemic funding that kept the City financially afloat,” according to Grant McClintock of the Civic Federation. “The pandemic is over, but many of the programs and personnel positions established during that time remain, and without the benefit of the federal funding that previously supported them.”

Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) proposes to offset a $1.15 billion shortfall by taxing the businesses that anchor Chicago’s economy, borrowing and more gimmicks.

The mayor proposes to increase the tax on the lease of “personal property” like computers, vehicles and software from 11 percent to 14 percent, and to bring back the city’s “head tax,” which would result in large employers paying $33 per worker, per month.
By making it more expensive to do business or hire workers in the city, these measures threaten Chicago’s future economic growth and tax collections. These moves are especially reckless given that the Chicago Fed’s 12-month hiring outlook is the weakest it’s been since the pandemic. Gov. JB Pritzker (D) says the head tax would penalize employment.

www:

Automatically translated preprints from the Chinese arXiv (ChinaXiv).

Erin Gretzinger:

In letters sent to residents with their tax bills this year, the city of Madison reported eight area school districts, including the Madison Metropolitan School District as the largest one, accounted for more than half of residents’ tax bill this year. Schools have historically accounted for 42% to 46% of the average tax bill, so the jump to over 50% wasn’t surprising given the referendum approvals, Soldner said.

“Madison is always going to get less from the state, because in the eyes of the state and school funding, we are considered wealthy because Dane County and city of Madison property values are so high compared to the rest of the state,” Soldner said. “But the state really just hasn’t kept up in any shape or form in terms of state dollars to support Madison schools.”

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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?

Alec Johnson:

After last month’s decision to close three elementary schools, the Waukesha School District on Dec. 10 shared the next steps in closing those buildings and moving students and staff to the district’s remaining schools.

Waukesha Schools Superintendent James Sebert said open house and enrollment dates have been set and that the district is figuring out boundary maps and transportation eligibility.

The open houses are an opportunity for students and families to learn more about a particular school or program. The enrollment dates are for all district families to express preferences on what district school their children attend, something the district does every year. Generally, the district holds these events in December, but backed it up to January this school year due to the school closure vote, Sebert told a reporter.

The School Board voted in November to close Bethesda and Hawthorne elementary schools, as well as the former Whittier elementary school building, which currently houses the district’s STEM elementary program.

Jessie Opoien Laura Schulte

The president has said letting states create a “patchwork” of AI regulations would impede U.S. efforts to lead the world in AI development.

The executive order says it would not preempt “otherwise lawful” AI laws relating to child safety protections, but does not include additional details.

In Wisconsin, recently enacted state laws governing AI include a requirement for campaign ads to include a disclaimer if they use artificial intelligence, an expansion of the definition of child pornography to include AI-generated content and a ban on distributing sexually explicit “deepfakes” without consent.

Evers said he is proud Wisconsin has led the way “to address dangerous and harmful effects caused by emerging technologies like AI” in a bipartisan fashion.

“Mr. President, it is breathtaking for you to threaten to punish and withhold federal funding from states like Wisconsin for taking decisive, bipartisan action to pass common-sense policies that protect Wisconsinites from being potentially being sexually exploited using AI-generated materials or being deceived by political ads made using AI,” Evers wrote.

“Put simply, doing so could reopen the door for bad actors in Wisconsin to resume reprehensible behavior we have worked to criminalize while leaving fewer options for local law enforcement to be able to hold those bad actors accountable. This is an untenable and unacceptable result,” Evers wrote.

Kristen Smith:

A parent of a 10th grade student came into school to talk to me the other day. He was helping his son with a Physics assignment, and he said that as they were working through an equation together, he realized that his son didn’t have his multiplication facts mastered. He wanted to come talk to me because I’m his son’s 10th grade math teacher. He wasn’t frustrated with me, but he wanted my advice on what to do about it, and above all, he was just genuinely dumbfounded that no teacher in his son’s educational history had ever brought to his attention that he didn’t know his multiplication table facts. 

I wanted to tell this parent that this was the least surprising news I had heard all day and that many of my 10th grade students did not know their multiplication facts. Every year I have a few students who feel the need to tell me this at the start of the school year, and I always reassure them that by 10th grade they will get to use a calculator for most assignments. This masks my true feelings about the situation, which is that it is a huge disservice to our students to allow them to go through elementary and middle school without mastery of these facts. 

When I taught 6th grade, I spent the first four months of the school year practicing facts with my students at the start of class each day (we called it the Skill Builder) and then tutoring students who needed more support with mastering the facts. I knew this was important because without fluency with multiplication facts, students would get completely overwhelmed when I taught decimal division later in the year. Their working memory would be overloaded as they tried to hold on to the steps of the procedure while also trying to recall all of their facts. The automaticity with facts also unlocked the ability to reason about whether an answer made sense or compare quantities with fractions. For my high school students, the ones who don’t have fluency with their multiplication facts struggle more to make sense of proportional reasoning problems like triangle similarity problems. They are more likely to fail to catch computation errors in their work. As hard as they may work to gain algebraic fluency with solving equations and substituting into functions, they are always held back by their lack of foundational numeracy.

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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

Dissident Teacher:

“How frugal is the chariot that bears the human soul.” – Emily Dickinson

Benjamin Franklin did not invent the lending library — he invented the free market version of it: a member-supported circulating library. For an upfront sign-up fee and small monthly payments, tradesmen, merchants, farmers, et al could borrow anything within. The Founding Fathers all recognized the necessity of education, though they argued the extent to which the state should run such a system — yet another thing they were right to be concerned about. Still, Franklin’s system meant that access to great ideas was no longer reserved for the rich. 

And here we are, 250 years later, many of us with the space and the disposable income necessary to build the kind of library that would’ve made any of those great men envious — thanks to independent used booksellers in our towns and nationally on eBay and companies like Amazon.

My purpose here is to make it easier for you to find and purchase the books I recommend. I’ve separated the libraries into three age groupings and all the lists are searchable by genre, so if you have a sense of who your reader is, selecting a fitting title will be easier. 

You can navigate each list with the pagination button on the top right corner of the table or search by genre, author, and title. Give some attention to lexile level. Lexile levels below 800 are best for young readers. Mid-range readers are comfortable anywhere from 700-1100, and experienced readers will thrive at 1000+. Don’t be afraid to pick up a book with a high lexile score — just know you may end up reading it to your child instead of with him. 

While I am an Amazon affiliate and I’d love it if you bought these books using my links, eBay is a great place to buy them used at low prices. Sometimes the only way to get a particular title is from a used bookseller. Many can also be found on Kindle, and the out-of-print titles are often under $3 in the Kindle bookstore. Physical books are much better for young readers though.

Jacob Savage:

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career. I was thirty-one, I’d been in Los Angeles for five years writing scripts. There had been minor successes, a couple of small projects optioned, and I’d recently started writing with my best friend. We were writing constantly, making each other better, building momentum. 

Success felt close. Back then it always did.

We’d written a pilot script that a veteran showrunner had agreed, in a very theoretical, very Hollywood sort of way, to “come on” to. That project had fizzled, so we were surprised when an executive emailed us out of the blue to meet. The showrunner explained he’d submitted us for an upcoming writer’s room he was going to run—the exec had loved our pilot and wanted to hire us.

This was it, the moment our careers were supposed to take off. We’d put in our time—I’d been tutoring SATs and reselling tickets to make ends meet while I wrote—and five years seemed par for the course, based on the slightly older guys we knew who’d made it.

But of course, by 2016, we were already too late. 

The showrunner emailed us back apologetically. “I had initially thought I might be able to bring you guys on,” he wrote, “but in the end it wasn’t possible.”

We met with the executive anyway—a Gen-X white guy—who told us how much he loved our pilot. But the writers room was small, he explained apologetically, and the higher-level writers were all white men. They couldn’t have an all-white-male room. Maybe, if the show got another season, they’d be able to bring us on.

They never did. 

The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023. 

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Peachy Keanan:

One of the unspoken reasons for the decline in marriage and births: young men of marriage age had their careers derailed in favor of diversity hires.

DEI is economic genocide.

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Vittorio:

fifth-order: institutional trust gone. once you know positions are filled by demographics rather than competence, every credential becomes suspect (if not a priori worthless). is your doctor qualified or a diversity hire? your pilot? your engineer? you can’t prove any individual is incompetent, but you can’t trust any individual is competent either. medicine skepticism, academic failure, media skepticism, none of this emerged organically. it was manufactured by the DEI hire you can’t be sure is qualified to treat you.

Michael T. Nietzel

Purdue University will begin requiring that all of its undergraduate students demonstrate basic competency in artificial intelligence starting with freshmen who enter the university in 2026.

The new “AI working competency” graduation requirement was approved by the university’s Board of Trustees at its meeting on December 12. It’s part of a broader AI@Purdue strategy that spans five areas: Learning with AI, Learning about AI, Research AI, Using AI and Partnering in AI.

“The reach and pace of AI’s impact to society, including many dimensions of higher education, means that we at Purdue must lean in and lean forward and do so across different functions at the university,” said Purdue President Mung Chiang in a news release. “AI@Purdue strategic actions are part of the Purdue Computes strategic initiative, and will continue to be refreshed to advance the missions and impact of our university.”

Samantha Calderon:

A new senior executive director of schools and learning at the Madison Metropolitan School District has been hired, according to officials.

Dr. Keona S. Jones brings nearly three decades of experience as an administrator and educator

Jones was most recently the assistant state superintendent for the Division for Student and School Success at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She was first appointed in 2019 and reappointed two years later.

Her previous titles include assistant principal, early childhood education director, special education teacher, consultant, and executive director. Jones was also an adjunct lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The Wisconsin Association for Talented and Gifted even named Jones as administrator of the year for her commitment to student success.

“Dr. Jones brings a deep understanding of instructional excellence, student and staff supports, and the systems that help schools and students thrive,” said Dr. Carlettra Stanford, assistant superintendent of schools and learning. “Her experience positions her well to advance our strategic priorities and strengthen the structures that support our school communities. We are excited to welcome her to MMSD.”

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

Ben Unglesbee:

The new method for evaluating programs within the Universities of Wisconsin’s 13 institutions could substantially increase how many programs go on the chopping block each year.

The current rubric, which flags programs that confer fewer than 25 degrees over five years, has identified from 41 to 54 programs for review in recent years, according to a task force on program elimination that presented the committee’s findings.

“While the current metric has been useful in determining an academic program’s performance based on the conference of degrees, it represents a lagging indicator,” the task force said. “In addition, by focusing on graduated students rather than enrolled, the current metric does not fully represent the instructional workload associated with providing curriculum for a program.”

While the group honed in on a numerical measure of a program’s health, members also highlighted that metrics don’t capture its whole value.

Along with quantitative rubrics, “the value of a program is also reflected in its qualitative contributions,” the task force said. “Both measures should be included in a thorough and fair monitoring process that looks at the totality of contribution of an academic program.”

Educated & Free:

“You can get away with copying everything. But you’re gonna experience einstellung which means that you’ll think you know what you’re doing because you’re smart enough to reverse engineer the answer but you’ll really have no clue how to do the actual work. And my in-class, on paper handwritten test WILL out you. I have tests weighted at 80%; they effectively ARE your grade. There are no retakes. There are no test corrections. There is no extra credit. There is only the test. Allocate your time accordingly.”

Heike Larson:

Starting today, high school students can apply to Progress in Medicine, a new program by the Roots of Progress Institute.

What: In this summer program, high school students will explore careers in in medicine, biotech, health policy, and longevity. We will inspire them with stories of historical progress and future opportunities in medicine, help them think about a wider range of careers, and raise their aspirations about how they can contribute to progress in medicine. The program centers on this central question:

People today live longer, healthier, and less painful lives than ever before. Why? Who made those changes possible? Can we keep this going? And could you play a part?

Help spread the word about this program, especially to smart, ambitious teens:

Becky Jacobs:

Starting next fall, full-time faculty and instructional academic staff at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee will need to teach at least one course per semester and a minimum of 12 credit hours each school year. Employees at the other 11 state universities face higher requirements.

All credits for general education courses must also be transferable and satisfy general education requirements across the universities by September.

Sen. Dianne Hesselbein, D-Middleton, said she likes that students will have better predictability in how credits transfer.

“But I do think this is a slippery slope of monkeying around in the university system, and we don’t really have any business there,” said Hesselbein, Democrats’ leader in the Senate.

…..

“My hope is that as we move forward we can also do this with other opportunities to have credit transfers,” Vos said. “Right now, it’s only those (general education) requirements. But if you take accounting at Whitewater, I don’t know why it shouldn’t be accounting at Stout.”

Scott Calvert:

Teacher Andrea Gonzales sipped tea from an apple-adorned mug a student gave her, and mixed granola into a bowl of yogurt. It was 5:35 a.m. on a recent school day. Except for the kitchen, the home she and her fiancé share with four housemates was dark. In the distance, a rooster crowed.

Gonzales wouldn’t greet her first-graders until 7:55, but she stepped out under an inky sky and left in her Toyota Prius at 6 o’clock sharp. The drive to her public school on the Monterey Peninsula often takes an hour or more in traffic. It is a slog she has dealt with for years, while searching in vain for reasonably priced housing near work.

“We have talked as a family about honestly not even just leaving the district but leaving the state, just because it’s so expensive,” said Gonzales, 30 years old.

edunomics:

We’re regularly adding more, so check back. OR use our template below to make your own.

OR use our template to enter student enrollment and staffing data for your state or district, starting with the 2014-15 school year. We encourage the use of state or district published and audited data. Alternatively, data can be found on NCES Common Core of Data.

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more.

 Hollis Robbins

The dirtiest secret in higher education is that there is no good data on the quality of teaching and teachers on college campuses. There is no way for anyone to know how good or bad teaching is, beyond anecdotes. Ask around. As someone who has been in this business for 30 years, I will tell you: things are not great and getting worse. I estimate that except for very elite private institutions (Princeton, Wesleyan, and the like), well over half of university instruction across the U.S. is fair to poor. Perhaps 25% is good and 5% is excellent.

How can I make such a claim? I’ll get to that and I’d love to be wrong. But I challenge anyone to push back with real data. There isn’t any beyond what I outline below.

I also challenge anyone to show me any college or university marketing materials that guarantee the quality of classes students will take. You won’t find much. It’s impossible to guarantee quality because there is no operational definition of quality teaching. You may find guarantees of a “quality education” defined by small classes and award-winning professors with Ivy League PhDs, but you will not find an institution that guarantees that some percentage of the courses a student will take will be high quality.

The dirty secret isn’t that there are bad teachers. Of course there are, just as there are bad doctors, bad lawyers, bad plumbers, bad customer service reps, bad cops. The problem is that there’s an entire ecosystem and infrastructure that decided that quality at the micro level, at the level of the individual instructor and individual course, isn’t as important as claims of “social impact” at the macro level, for the institution and the sector as a whole. And so, the inscrutability of teaching quality persists.

Who is to blame for the lack of attention to quality teaching, the lack of data, and the absence of any good definition of quality teaching? Three groups. First, colleges and universities who have no incentive to define or measure teaching quality and have not funded serious controlled studies. Supporting quality is expensive. Second, faculty, who want even less attention paid to teaching quality than their institutions do. In fact, if there is one topic on which faculty and institutions are in complete agreement it is avoiding the topic of teaching quality altogether. (Both prefer to focus on “belonging” and “satisfaction,” the drivers of grade inflation.)

George Wiebe

Most of the jump is the result of two Madison School District referendums passed last year, which increased school taxes by nearly $780, or about 18%, on the average Madison home, according to the city’s breakdown of the tax bill.

Voters also approved a $22 million city referendum last year, although that increase was reflected on homeowners’ 2024 property tax bills.

The Madison School District makes up just over half of Madison homeowners’ property tax bills. That’s a point Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway sought to stress in a letter that accompanied the eye-popping tax bills this week.

“It’s the responsibility of the City of Madison to send out this tax bill on behalf of Dane County, Madison College (MATC), and your school district,” the mayor wrote. “However, the City’s share is only 34 percent of your total property tax bill.”

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Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

Lindsay Clark 

Protests force disclosure of costs totaling $16,000 per student over 7 year rollout replacing 80 legacy systems

The total cost of a Workday implementation project at Washington University in St. Louis is set to hit almost $266 million, it was revealed after the project was the subject of protests from students.

In late October, students demonstrated outside the Faculty Senate demanding the University’s leadership reveal more details about its finances, including its spending on Workday, amid concerns about job losses at the institution.

In an email to Student Life, the institution’s independent student newspaper, David Gray, executive vice chancellor for finance and chief financial officer (CFO), said the total cost of the project was set to reach upwards of $265 million over at least seven years, roughly $16,000 per student.

The student newspaper said the Workday project was broken down into $81 million for financial and human resources services (HCM), $98.9 million for the student application called Sunrise, and $56.5 million for planning, data integration, and financial aid. Meanwhile $23.8 million in the 2026 financial year is for support and $5.7 million for annual licensing.

Kayla Huynh :

Nearly 37% of Wisconsin students in 4-year-old kindergarten through third grade scored below the 25th percentile on early literacy assessments last school year, according to the state Department of Instruction.

For Milwaukee Public Schools, over half of 4K through third graders – or nearly 12,500 students – tested below the 25th percentile, results from the exams show.

The assessments, required under the state’s 2023 literacy law Act 20, evaluate students on reading skills and identify children at risk of reading difficulty.

Data from the first year of the literacy screeners, released Dec. 1, show about 97,400 Wisconsin students in 4K through third grade scored in the bottom quarter of students in reading. Under the state’s literacy law, students scoring below the 25th percentile must receive additional support in reading, including a personalized learning plan.

The law also requires the DPI to report results of the screeners to the Legislature annually. State Superintendent Jill Underly said the first year of data will serve as a baseline for student performance.

‘These data are critical in helping schools guide instruction and intervention – not to define a student’s potential,’ Underly said in a statement. ‘With time and a sustained investment in strengthened classroom instruction and, as needed, additional reading support, we can move steadily toward our goal of making sure every Wisconsin child excels at reading by the end of third grade.’

About 39% of 5-year-old kindergarten through third grade students – or over 86,200 students – received interventions under a personalized learning plan last school year, the DPI reported.

More:

Nearly 44% of Madison School District 4K through third graders scored below the 25th percentile on an early literacy screener required under a 2023 state law, the state Department of Public Instruction reported Monday,

The results were slightly worse than for students in those grades statewide. About 37% of them scored in the bottom quartile

Results varied widely by grade in the Madison and other school districts. More than half of Madison’s kindergartners and first graders, for example, scored in the bottom quartile, while only 13% of students in 4-year-old kindergarten scored in the bottom quartile.

Chester E Finn, Jr.

The College Board high command is defensive about the value and predictive power of the SAT and AP exams (Letters, Dec. 9). But on the whole the company is right: The tests are better predictors of college performance than anything anyone else is using, especially in California, where diplomas seem to be handed out by the bushel with little or no attention to student learning.

External measures akin to audits, like the SAT and APs, tend to be more reliable and accurate than grades and statewide tests, for which the standards and cut scores keep fluctuating. The College Board’s products aren’t getting “easier” as such. But the company keeps introducing more variants, including subjects widely thought to be easier. It’s removed some elements—such as SAT essays—that many find more revealing than multiple-choice questions. And it does occasionally recalibrate its scoring in various ways. It isn’t pure. It’s simply the best available, and in my view pretty darn good.

Josh Barro:

And that, of course, gets at a major reason why so many students are suddenly “disabled” — it gives them a leg up, academically, in a supposedly elite, achievement-measuring environment.1

A college education is supposed to both build human capital and send a signal about human capital to employers. The explosion of accommodations is one of several forces that are simultaneously undermining elite colleges’ value on both of those dimensions:

• Admissions standards at many schools have gotten less rigorous. This is because many universities have made standardized testing optional for applicants; in some cases, colleges will not even consider standardized test scores that students voluntarily report. The University of California Board of Regents voted in 2020 to phase out using test scores in admissions decisions, and the result is an exploding fraction of students at UC San Diego who can’t do basic math. This undermines the signal value of the degree: having gained admission to a UC is not the signal of academic aptitude that it once was. It also undermines actual human capital creation, because top schools are enrolling an unknown (but increasing) number of students who won’t be able to learn advanced material.
• Once students are in college, the grades they receive have greatly inflated — a majority of grades at Harvard College are now straight A’s. This reduces the signal value of a high GPA: if everyone gets the same A’s, you can’t tell from a transcript which students actually performed the best. It also reduces the fundamental value of a college education, because it gives students the option to work less hard and learn less while still getting good grades — an option many are surely taking.

David Margulies

Recent state math tests (CAASPP) show many Monterey County districts reporting low percentages of K-12 students proficient in math: Only 22 percent in Salinas, 19 percent in King City, 17 percent in North Monterey County (NMCUSD). Essential foundational skills aren’t being taught and practiced to mastery.

One such skill is math fact fluency, specifically memorizing single-digit addition facts, like 3+4=7, and memorizing single digit multiplication facts, like 6×8=48 (“the times tables”).

California’s Math Content Standards, the content students are expected to learn, define fluency as “fast and accurate,” explicitly requiring students to “know from memory” these math facts by the end of third grade.

Warner Todd Huston

It must be getting claustrophobic over at the CTU Center

The feds seem to have caught onto the financial mess the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has created for itself and are demanding the union’s audit records going back to 2019, if they even exist, that is.

The CTU has been stonewalling since the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee sent its letter on November 20th, but last week the union finally claimed that they would comply with the committee’s requests, though they have pushed the date off from December 8th to the 22nd.

Already the CTU has been holding information back from its members and violating its own rulesmandating that its audits be released to members annually. And for a while it looked like the union was going to do the same to the feds.

The notice taken by the congressional committee comes after a group of teachers filed a lawsuitearly in October to force the CTU to release the audits it has withheld from its members.

The CTU attempted to have the lawsuit thrown out, but a judge denied the request.

The House committee noted how alarmed it is over the CTU’s refusal to obey its own rules and worried the union is acting to “betray the trust of the very people they are meant to serve.”

Phoebe Arslanagic-Little

This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a particularly extreme form. The only factor that has little parallel in Western societies is the legacy of highly successful antinatalist campaigns by the South Korean government in previous decades.

South Korea is often held up as an example of the failure of public policy to reverse low fertility rates. This is seriously misleading. Contrary to popular myth, South Korean pro-parent subsidies have not been very large, and relative to their modest size, they have been fairly successful.

The story of South Korean fertility rates is thus doubly significant. On the one hand, it illustrates just how potent anti-parenting factors can become, creating a profoundly hostile environment in which to raise children and discouraging a whole society from doing so. On the other, it may offer a scintilla of hope that focused and generous policy can address these problems, shaping a way back from the brink of catastrophe.

———

Choose life.

Timur Kuran:

University professors are granted tenure essentially for the freedom to carry their research wherever it leads. But the share of tenured and tenure-track faculty has been falling. According to AAUP (see below), it fell from 53.1% in 1987 to 31.8% in 2023 (below). There are reasons to expect the decline to continue:
(1) Financial difficulties incentivize universities to hire part-time adjuncts, who are much cheaper and easily terminated,
(2) In recent years, most tenured faculty have failed to push back against woke censorship, thus failing to fulfill their end of the implicit bargain: speaking honestly even when its inconvenient to do so. Even worse, tenured faculty have participated in censorship and cancellation campaigns inimical to core university functions.
(3) Partly because of (2), the university has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the public, and legislators are less willing than in the past to subsidize universities and the professoriate.
(4) As fertility declines and population falls, universities will prefer short-term contracts to indefinitely lasting tenure contracts that commit them to decades of employment.
I haven’t even mentioned AI. That’s for another day.

———

Dana Goldstein:

“We do one book after state testing, and we did ‘The Great Gatsby.’ … A lot of kids had not read a novel in class before.”

— Laura Henry, 10th-grade English teacher near Houston

“My son in 9th grade listened to the audio of ‘A Raisin in the Sun.’ For ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ they watched the balcony scene instead of reading.” 

— Rebekah Jacobs, Rockville, Md.

“We typically spend a ridiculous amount of time reading each book, such that in my freshman year, we read only one, ‘Macbeth.’”

— Liv Niklasson, age 16, Los Alamos, N.M.

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading.

Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times.

Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts.

Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future, even the most sophisticated stories and knowledge will be imparted mainly through audio and video, the forms that are dominating in the era of mobile, streaming media.

We wanted to find out how students and teachers feel about the shift, and what role schools can play. So The Times asked educators, parents and students to tell us about their experiences with high school reading.

More than 2,000 people responded

———

Karen Vaites:

I’m glad to see the supply side aspect of the issue get its due:

“Some complained about the effect of technology on students’ stamina for reading and interest in books. But more pointed toward the curriculum products their schools had purchased from major publishers.

Those programs often revolve around students reading short stories, articles, and excerpts from novels, then answering short-form questions and writing brief essays.

Students typically access the content online, often using school-issued laptops.

These practices begin in elementary school, and by high school, book-reading can seem like a daunting hurdle.”

———-

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

Wall Street Journal:

An NBC News poll recently found that only one-third of Americans believe a four-year college degree is worth the cost. A new study by the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank helps explain why: Many young college graduates out of work are having a harder time than high-school grads finding jobs, and artificial intelligence isn’t to blame.

The share of Americans who believe a college degree pays off has fallen by 20 percentage points since 2013. Today, 63% say that it’s “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off,” according to the NBC poll. Only 46% of those with college degrees believe they are worth the cost, a 17-point decline.

You don’t need an economics degree to notice that young college grads are struggling. According to the Cleveland Fed study, the unemployment gap between high-school and college grads between the ages of 22 and 27 has tightened to a mere 2.5-percentage points, compared with about five percentage points in previous decades.

By Jonah Kaplan, Michael Kaplan

Luxury cars, private villas and overseas wire transfers: CBS News obtained dozens of files and photos that reveal how Minnesota fraudsters blew through hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars as part of one of the biggestCOVID-era fraud schemes.

The files document a spending spree in which defendants, many of Somali descent, took taxpayer money meant to feed hungry children and used it to buy cars, property and jewelry. Videos show them popping champagne at an opulent Maldives resort. In a text message, one defendant boasts: “You are gonna be the richest 25 year old InshaAllah [God willing].”

The documents feature exhibits from a recent federal trial, many of which are being made public by CBS News for the first time. The exhibits include:

• A confirmation email for a stay in an overwater villa with a private pool at Radisson Blu Resort Maldives
• Lakefront property in Minnesota
• Receipts showing wire transfers to China and East Africa
• First class tickets to Istanbul and Amsterdam
• A 2021 Porsche Macan
• Stacks of cash, texted between defendants

Joanna Slater:

A growing number of educators are finding that oral exams allow them to test their students’ learning without the benefit of AI platforms such as ChatGPT

When students in Catherine Hartmann’s honors seminar at the University of Wyoming took their final exams this month, they encountered a testing method as old as the ancient philosophers whose ideas they were studying.

——-

Commentary.

Eric Turkheimer, Daniel T. Willingham

QUESTION: What does an IQ score actually mean? On the one hand, I’ve heard people say that these scores are meaningless—a high IQ simply shows that the child is good at taking intelligence tests. On the other hand, I know that some districts use IQ test scores as gatekeepers for their gifted and talented programs. What is the science behind IQ scores?

ANSWER: An IQ score is a summary of how successfully a child can answer the types of questions that are frequently posed in school, especially questions that require thinking abstractly with words, numbers, or space. This summary number is not meaningless because it predicts students’ success in school and in many jobs.

But IQ is frequently misunderstood by educators, families, and the general public. Instead of being recognized as a summary of correctly answered questions, it’s believed to be a measure of an internal essence within the child that many call their learning potential. But there is little evidence that such an essence exists at all, let alone that IQ tests measure it.

A better way to think about an IQ score is as a snapshot of achievement now, rather than future potential. This conceptualization offers a better lens for how we might enable all children to answer more questions correctly—that is, to raise their IQs.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis:

I have complicated feelings about being freelance in 2025. (Nervous doesn’t cover it.) But I am genuinely excited to be out reporting again, after spending the last four years almost exclusively editing long magazine stories. My intention is for that to include much more regular posting on this Substack — which for now I’m calling, appropriately, Personal News — until I figure out what this newsletter should be. Ideas in the comments, please.

For now, partially prompted by a recent seminar I gave to some students at Johns Hopkins, here are a few things that more than a decade of editing magazine stories has taught me about writing.

Rachel Bachman and Laine Higgins:

For almost all of its 129-year existence, the Big Ten has positioned itself as a moral custodian of college football.

This was a conference of hulking stadiums and buttoned-up traditions that was older than the NCAA itself. It bragged about the academic prestige of its schools and reminded its athletes that they were students first, sneering at all those other schools that had the audacity to win at all costs.

The Big Ten was so wedded to its own way of doing things that Ohio State undergraduates still hear about the time that a bunch of professors kept the Buckeyes out of the Rose Bowl to punish a coach for paying his players.

But in recent decades, Big Ten leaders have appeared less concerned with maintaining its particular heritage and more interested in squeezing every last dollar out of the business of college sports.

What was once a hallowed collection of 10 Midwestern universities has nearly doubled in size, to 18 schools, including those in the New York and Los Angeles TV markets. The Big Ten now generates more than $1 billion a year from its media rights.

Caleb Watney:

The National Science Foundation announces Friday that it is launching one of the most significant experiments in science funding in decades. A new initiative called Tech Labs will invest up to $1 billion over the next five years in large-scale long-term funding to teams of scientists working outside traditional university structures, a major departure from how the agency has funded research over the past 75 years.

The timing couldn’t be better. The way our science agencies fund research in the U.S. no longer matches the way many breakthroughs actually happen.

For most of the postwar era, federally funded science has been built around a simple model. Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 essay, “Science: The Endless Frontier,” sketched a vision of government-backed research led by university-based scientists pursuing their own ideas. The system that emerged—small, project-based federal grants mostly to individual scientists—worked brilliantly for decades. It gave researchers autonomy, kept politics at arm’s length, and helped make American science the envy of the world.

50can:

A 50-STATE SURVEY OF 20,000 PARENTS

A new 50-state study from 50CAN and Edge Research, offering an unprecedented, state-by-state examination of the current education landscape and what is important to parents.

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

Beanie:

Parents, don’t judge your children’s educational progress/ability by their grades. Ask them questions about things they should know (no Googling allowed). Have them read aloud to you (regardless of their age). Don’t assume that ‘A’ is anything other than a participation trophy that the teacher was pressured to give thanks to grade inflation.

Matthew Ygelsias:

There is no proliferation of students in wheelchairs. The issue is the proliferation of students making disability claims largely based on mental health, largely in order to get extra time on tests. And taking tests is very much part of the core mission of undergraduate education. 

Time pressure is either not an important part of the assessment, in which case nobody should be subjected to it, or else it is an important part of the assessment, in which case everybody should be subjected to it. 

Maya Sen from the Kennedy School, who I generally think has good takes, reacted to this story by saying that abuse of accommodations is “far from a pressing national policy problem.” And I can see where she’s coming from there. But I think it’s just one manifestation of something that really is a pressing national policy problem, which is that the stakeholders in the American higher-education system can’t really articulate what it is they’re trying to do. So as various controversies pop up — about disability accommodations or viewpoint discrimination or admissions — there’s not a coherent response because there are no guiding principles to refer back to. 

And that’s pretty important. These institutions play major roles in American society. They are nodes in our entire scientific-research enterprise and a major export industry. Employers rely on them to perform both screening and social capital functions. They are informal-but-significant authorities and sources of expertise and producers of knowledge.

Julie Quinlan Brame

Last month, the MPS Board voted to end the Carmen Northwest Charter Schoolcontract in 2027. That decision dismayed me deeply, because it appeared driven more by ideology about charter schools than by the needs of students, families, staff — and even MPS itself.

I come from a family of teachers. In fact, my mom was one of her school’s teachers’ union representatives for many years. I attended public schools from kindergarten through college. I care profoundly about public education.

My husband is a second-career high school teacher who began teaching in MPS on the city’s North Side. His experience so disillusioned him that he nearly left teaching altogether. But Sister Mary Diez, a mentor of his at Alverno College, urged him to try one more year — this time at Carmen. So, he joined the first cohort of teachers to open Carmen Northwest in 2013.

xAI

Today, xAI is thrilled to announce a groundbreaking partnership with the Government of El Salvador to launch the world’s first nationwide AI-powered education program. Over the next two years, we’ll deploy Grok across more than 5,000 public schools, delivering personalized learning to over one million students and empowering thousands of teachers as collaborative partners in education.

This initiative will create adaptive, curriculum-aligned tutoring that adjusts to each student’s pace, preferences, and mastery level—ensuring every child, from urban centers to rural communities, receives world-class education tailored to their needs. By co-developing this system with El Salvador, we’ll generate new methodologies, datasets, and frameworks to guide responsible AI use in classrooms globally, with a focus on local contexts, safety, and human-centered impact.

At xAI, our mission is to advance scientific discovery and deepen our collective understanding of the universe. This partnership embodies that purpose by harnessing Grok’s frontier capabilities to accelerate learning at scale, bridging educational gaps, and fostering innovation that benefits humanity. It’s a step toward making advanced AI accessible to all, reimagining how nations build knowledge for generations to come.

Sam Hasselby:

As the NYT reported, the Obama Presidential Center is a “center” not a library, Obama privatized the archive and does not allow the National Archives and Records Admin to run it. nytimes.com/2019/02/20/art…

Nate Gartrell:

A UC Berkeley professor smelled a rat — over the years there had been $46,855 in damage from computers that failed, and nearly all of it seemed to affect one particular Ph.D. candidate at the college’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department.

The professor wondered if the student’s luck was really that bad, or if something else was afoot. So he installed a hidden camera — disguised in a department laptop, and pointed it at the student’s computer. According to police, the sly move captured another Ph.D. candidate, 26-year-old Jiarui Zou, damaging his fellow student’s computer with some implement that caused sparks to fly out of the laptop.

Now, Zou has been charged with three felony counts of vandalism, related to the destruction of three computers on Nov. 9-10. The charges allege the damage amounted to more than $400 each time, though the professor who reported the vandalism, and the affected student, told police they suspect Zou of the additional incidents that had been going on for years, court records show.

Zou was arrested on Nov. 12 at UC Berkeley’s Cory Hall and declined to talk to police, according to court records. He is due for his first court appearance on Dec. 15 and is no longer in custody, records show.

Betsy McKay and Caroline Kimeu:

One of the greatest public-health achievements of recent decades has been driving down child mortality around the world. Now, that long-running decline is reversing.

The number of deaths of children under 5 years old is projected to rise this year for the first time in decades, the Gates Foundation, the philanthropy chaired by billionaire Bill Gates that is a major funder of global health and development causes, said in a report Thursday.

About 243,000 more children under 5 years have died or will die this year than in 2024, according to the projections, which were made by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which measures global-health indicators and is funded in part by the Gates Foundation.

Danielle DuClos:

After the Cap Times revealed the state Department of Public Instruction had investigated more than 200 educators from 2018 through 2023 following allegations of sexual misconduct or grooming, public officials proposed new legislation, pledged greater transparency and ordered a wide-ranging audit.

Yet, Wisconsin’s laws and the Department of Public Instruction’s policies to prevent educator misconduct continue to fall short of efforts by other states and what advocates say are best practices.

Clear state laws on employee screenings, staff and student training, and disclosing misconduct to future employers are all key to stopping sexual abuse of children, said Jetta Bernier, executive director of the national advocacy group Enough Abuse.

“Not every school leader or school department or education leader is aware of the extent and scope of the problem. … You need to institutionalize policies. Otherwise, you’re running in place,” Bernier said.

Compared to other states, including its Midwestern neighbors, Wisconsin lacks laws mandating more transparency on educator misconduct, such as banning confidentiality agreements between school districts and former employees.

Here are seven ways Wisconsin’s laws and policies could change to mirror practices in other states or more closely follow advocate recommendations to strengthen educator sexual misconduct prevention:

Dan D. Goldhaber and Dominic J. Brewer

The authors provide evidence that teachers can have an impact on student outcomes, and they show that student achievement in math and science can be improved by requiring teacher training in those subject areas.

MOST public school systems reward teachers who obtain advanced degrees with a considerable increase in their base pay. Salary schedules
typically provide a pay premium averaging 11% for a master’s degree, 14% for an education specialist’s degree, and 17% for a doctorate over what a teacher would carn with a bachelor’s degree only Some school systems even require their teachers to obtain an advanced degree after a specified number of years of teaching in the district. The emphasis on teachers’ having or obtaining advanced degrees raises…..

——-

More.

Erika Edwards:

The measles outbreak in South Carolina is “accelerating” with no end in sight following Thanksgiving and other large gatherings, state health officials said Wednesday.

As of Wednesday, 111 measles cases had been reportedin what’s known as upstate South Carolina — an area in the northwest of the state that includes Greenville and Spartanburg.

“We are faced with ongoing transmission that we anticipate will go on for many more weeks,” Dr. Linda Bell, state epidemiologist for the South Carolina Department of Public Health, said during a news briefing Wednesday.

Twenty-seven of those cases have been reported since Friday. “That is a significant increase in our cases in a short period of time,” Bell said. She attributed the spike in part to holiday travel and get-togethers, as well as low vaccination rates.

According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.

Jordan Jantz

Imagine teaching a room full of students, wading through the tedious details of algebra, when a student starts throwing his pencils at his classmates. However, even as the teacher, you cannot do anything to confront or stop this disruption. 

Worse, imagine the disruption is more dangerous than hurling pencils, such as a student assaulting a classmate or attempting to attack you.

Now imagine being a student in the classroom, trying to focus through this incident. Or consider being the parent of the disruptive student, left uninformed about your child’s behavior.

This is the reality of many American public school classrooms.

But one bill in Wisconsin aims to reform classrooms in the state. Assembly Bill 614—the Teachers’ Bill of Rights—would protect teachers’ authority to maintain an orderly classroom and teach discipline.

Foundation for Freedom Online:

X became the first American platform to be fined under the EU’s Digital Services Act, receiving a €120 million penalty after allegedly refusing to open up its data to “disinformation researchers.”

Disinformation researchers are critical to online censorship – they are the ones who compile databases of disfavored speech and the advertisers that fund it.

Without access to online platforms’ data, the international censorship machine is blind.

The EU’s Digital Services Act and its provisions mandating data access for researchers emerged with the full support and cooperation of the US government under the previous administration.

23 US-funded “counter-disinformation” organizations are involved in the EU’s censorship regime, representing $15,444,695 in US taxpayer funding.

Many of these organizations will receive access to X’s data if EU bureaucrats successfully pressure the platform.

Documents reviewed by FFO also expose the central role of the US Trade Representative and the US International Trade Administration at the Department of Commerce.

Both collaborated with the EU under the previous administration, through the US-EU Trade and Technology Council, which developed a shared list of policy priorities that were later enshrined in the Digital Services Act.

These include the DSA’s provisions on data access for researchers that are now being used to target X.

Sophie Carson:

The former school building on the St. Rita Catholic Church campus in West Allis, which celebrated its last Mass in late November, has been sold to a private Christian school for $3.5 million.

The buyer, the Milwaukee-based Academy of Excellence, accepts tax-funded tuition vouchers through Wisconsin’s school choice programs, which allow students from lower-income families to attend private schools for free. Academy of Excellence is by far the state’s largest recipient of taxpayer dollars through choice programs, taking in $50.2 million for the current school year, state records show.

The Dec. 3 sale of the St. Rita school building, at 6021 W. Lincoln Ave., was made public through online deed records. It’s a five-story building with about 60,000 square feet of space. That includes a basement chapel and two upper floors previously used as a convent for the Catholic sisters who worked at St. Rita.

William Galston:

Beneath the ebb and flow of daily events, a long-term trend is reshaping the U.S. economy and society. Americans lately have been focused on artificial intelligence, but demography is likely to prove equally important.

To maintain a stable population, women need to give birth to 2.1 children on average during their lifetimes. This figure is the “replacement rate.” As recently as 2007, fertility was close to this rate. Since then it has fallen sharply, reaching a record low of 1.6 in 2024.

Over time, this will mean less demand for child care and fewer pupils in prekindergarten through elementary school. Within a generation, it will entail a diminishing number of working-age adults to finance healthcare and retirement for an expanding elderly population. Today’s young adults will likely see the U.S. population shrink over their lifetimes—unless birthrates rise or Americans are willing to accept large inflows of immigrants, principally from African and Muslim countries that have surpluses of working-age adults.

This might seem too far away to worry about. But in many parts of the U.S., the future is now. In areas with older, mainly white inhabitants, deaths exceed births and populations are shrinking.

Calli McMurray: 

Scientific publisher Springer Nature has begun to retract dozens of papers that relied on a dataset fraught with ethical and reliability concerns, The Transmitter has learned. Five papers have been retracted since 16 November, and 33 more retractions are planned, says Tim Kersjes, Springer Nature’s head of research integrity, resolutions.

The papers attempted to train neural networks to distinguish between autistic and non-autistic children in a dataset containing photos of children’s faces. Retired engineer Gerald Piosenka created the dataset in 2019 by downloading photos of children from “websites devoted to the subject of autism,” according to a description of the dataset’s methods, and uploaded it to Kaggle, a site owned by Google that hosts public datasets for machine-learning practitioners.

Alysia Finley:

Diagnosis rates of autism among children have more than tripled over the past 15 years. One reason, which Minnesota’s welfare scandal lays bare with shocking details, is Medicaid fraud and abuse.

Medicaid pays healthcare providers big bucks to diagnose and treat children with autism—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month for a single child. Yet states rarely verify that kids who are diagnosed actually meet the medical criteria for the disorder or that they get appropriate treatment from qualified specialists.

The result: Children covered by Medicaid or the government-run Children’s Health Insurance Program are 2.5 times as likely as those with private coverage to be diagnosed with autism. Many lower-income kids are labeled autistic merely because they have behavioral or developmental problems.

In 2014 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began requiring state Medicaid programs to cover autism therapy such as applied behavior analysis or ABA, a technique that uses positive reinforcement to improve social and communication skills. ObamaCare plans are also required to cover such therapy as an “essential benefit.”

Previously, the responsibility for providing such treatment fell mainly on public schools. Many lacked the expertise and were happy to shift the costs to federal taxpayers, which cover between 50% and 75% of Medicaid bills for most beneficiaries.

Anand:

McCabe’s research confirms this: once cheating becomes normalized and the system loses legitimacy, defection becomes the dominant strategy.

This is the classic prisoner’s dilemma.

• If everyone plays fair, all benefit. 
• But if others cheat and you don’t, you fall behind. 
• So even the “good” students feel forced to cheat just to stay even.

This, however, isn’t a moral collapse. 

It’s a design failure.

The real revelation? 

AI exposed that a lot of school work isn’t worth the effort. 

Maria Montessori said it a century ago: 

“The work must be something the child feels is worth doing.”

Schools forgot and flipped that. 

Andrew Gelman:

Recently we discussed a debate about how much of the improvement in test scores of students in Mississippi can be attributed to a policy of holding back more students–in particular, having kids repeat third grade will be expected to improve average for fourth graders. Education researchers Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky, and Daniel Robinson expressed skepticism about claimed dramatic benefits from the Mississippi plan, but then there were good arguments on the other side. One thing is that a lot of the discussion was about what happened right after the new plan was implemented in the mid-2010s, but there have been longer-term trends in Mississippi and other states. Changes in averages are always hard to interpret because of possible changes in compositional effects, including decisions of the age at which children start first grade, classification of students as disabled, and who’s taking the test in any given year. Also, all these comparisons are observational: as Wainer puts it, there’s no control group. On the other other hand, decisions need to be made in the absence of ironclad evidence. So I was left in a state of uncertainty.

A couple days later we learned that Wainer et al. had garbled some statistics, entirely misreporting Mississippi’s fourth and eighth grade math scores. Wainer et al. were making a general point about testing and selection, something they’d seen in various forms many times in their careers, but they were evidently not close to the data from Mississippi, even to the aggregate data that are easily available. As I discussed, I should’ve earlier been more suspicious of their claims about the math scores, given that in my earlier post I’d noticed a discrepancy between those and others’ claims. After all this, I remain unsure what to think about Mississippi. It’s an observational comparison, there’s selection, there’s variation between states in how much they teach to the test, and at the individual level there are the spillover effects on the kids who are not held back . . . all sorts of things. On the other hand there are these long-term trends. Selection has to be explaining some of what is happening in Mississippi–if you hold kids back and give them the test later or manage to exclude them from the tested population entirely, the average scores of the remaining students should rise–but it’s hard to say how much, and at some point you have to go with the data in front of you. As is often the case, we’re not just arguing about causal effects; we’re also trying to pin down what exactly is happening.

In the meantime, I received an email from another education researcher, Doug Harris, who writes:

Wainer et al. also got it wrong on the other cities like New Orleans. To quote them: “We have seen several previous K–12 education ‘miracles’ that turned out to be hoaxes. Five of them were in Houston, Atlanta, the District of Columbia, El Paso, and New Orleans . . . The New Orleans miracle was caused by a natural disaster. Hurricane Katrina tragically relocated about a third of the students who came from the poorest areas. Removing thousands of low scorers immediately raised the average test scores of the students who remained.”

Several people pointed this out to me [Harris], especially because I have been studying the New Orleans school reforms for more than 10 years. My center, the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, has published more than 50 articles about it. Our Advisory Board includes both supporters and critics of the reforms.

When I first came to New Orleans the sharp upward trend in outcomes gave me and others good reason to think this fit the first rule. The school reforms were sparked by Hurricane Katrina, which changed the city in many ways. Many families never returned, at least not to their original homes and neighborhoods. The whole city was hit hard, but low-income neighborhoods were hit a bit harder. Given the correlation between demographics and education outcomes, it was reasonable to be concerned that changes in the population, not the school reforms, drove the change in outcomes. Recognizing the problem, I spent years trying to disentangle this.

Vladimir Kogan:

DeBoer’s message is clear: “Put more simply and sadly, nothing in education works.”

Academic achievement, deBoer believes, is largely genetically determined. Even when education interventions are effective in the short term, many of the benefits fade out over time or simply shift the entire distribution—increasing performance across the board, without closing the gap between top and bottom performers. Students’ relative positions in that distribution remain “remarkably static over time, even in the face of massive spending and intense intervention, and . . . this persistence fatally undermines modern assumptions about schooling, its purpose, and its potential.”

DeBoer is a skilled writer who combines an entertaining style, cheeky barbs, and apparent substantive expertise. It is easy to see how he has built such an impressive following and why many of his arguments may seem persuasive to a lay reader. And deBoer is right to criticize education reformers for exaggerating the likely impacts of even their most effective policy proposals. As the Fordham Institute’s President Michael Petrilli acknowledged recently, “we have overpromised and underdelivered.”

But dig into the details, and it becomes clear that deBoer’s most fatalistic critiques of reform efforts are either greatly exaggerated or simply incorrect and the evidence he marshals to support his claims either cherry-picked or just made up.

To understand why progress in closing achievement gaps is possible, it is important to examine each major element of deBoer’s argument and see where he goes wrong.

Preston Byrne:

A client got their first letter from Australian eSafety. This was our reply. The US government was copied

Open Culture:

The his­to­ry of sci­ence, like most every his­to­ry we learn, comes to us as a pro­ces­sion of great, almost exclu­sive­ly white, men, unbro­ken but for the occa­sion­al token woman—well-deserving of her hon­ors but seem­ing­ly anom­alous nonethe­less. “If you believe the his­to­ry books,” notes the Time­line series The Matil­da Effect, “sci­ence is a guy thing. Dis­cov­er­ies are made by men, which spur fur­ther inno­va­tion by men, fol­lowed by acclaim and prizes for men. But too often, there is an unsung woman genius who deserves just as much cred­it” and who has been over­shad­owed by male col­leagues who grabbed the glo­ry.

In 1993, Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Mar­garet Rossiter dubbed the denial of recog­ni­tion to women sci­en­tists “the Matil­da effect,” for suf­frag­ist and abo­li­tion­ist Matil­da Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay “Woman as an Inven­tor” protest­ed the com­mon asser­tion that “woman… pos­sess­es no inven­tive or mechan­i­cal genius.” Such asser­tions, Gage pro­ceed­ed to demon­strate, “are care­less­ly or igno­rant­ly made… although woman’s sci­en­tif­ic edu­ca­tion has been gross­ly neglect­ed, yet some of the most impor­tant inven­tions of the world are due to her.”

Kevin L. Cope, Jens Frankenreiter, Scott Hirst, Eric A. Posner, Daniel Schwarcz and Dane Thorley:

In the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant technical advances, such that legal-advocacy organizations are increasingly adopting them as complements to — or substitutes for — lawyers and other human experts. Several studies have examined LLMs’ performance in taking law school exams, finding mixed results. Yet there have been no published studies systematically analyzing LLMs’ competence at one of law professors’ chief responsibilities: grading law school exams. This paper presents results of an analysis of how LLMs perform in evaluating student responses to legal analysis questions of the kind typically administered in law school exams. The underlying data come from exams in four subjects administered at top-30 U.S. law schools. Unlike some projects in computer or data science, our goal is not to design a new LLM that minimizes error or maximizes agreement with human graders. Rather, we seek to determine whether existing models — which can be straightforwardly applied by most professors and students — are already suitable for the task of law exam evaluation. We find that, when provided with a detailed rubric, the LLM grades correlate with the human grader at Pearson correlation coefficients of up to 0.93. Our findings suggest that, even if they do not fully replace humans in the near future, LLMs could soon be put to valuable tasks by law school professors, such as reviewing and validating professor grading, providing substantive feedback on ungraded midterms, and providing students feedback on self-administered practice exams.

Harriet Ryan:

Phillip Bell III was in tears when he phoned his grandparents’ farm outside Sacramento.

“Come and help me please,” his grandmother, Lorna Barnes, recalled the then-16-year-old sobbing in March 2023.

Two months earlier, his mother had whisked Bell, a nationally ranked wide receiver, off to a new school in Los Angeles, where they were living in a mansion previously occupied by the rapper Soulja Boy and leased with the help of a sportscaster whose son played quarterback.

It was just the first stop on Bell’s odyssey through the youth sports black market. Paying students to play sports is against state interscholastic rules. But in the nation’s football hotbeds, a secret economy in athletically gifted teens has thrived for years—and the recent arrival in most states of legal Name, Image and Likeness compensation for high-school athletes has only made it hotter.

Bell’s mother, who abused drugs, shopped him from school to school, demanding up to $72,000 a year, according to court filings, public records and interviews with relatives and others who knew the family. He also joined a club team that paid thousands of dollars a weekend.

Dave Cieslewicz:

I thought it was a crazy system, and still do. It was fundamentally undemocratic because so much influence was in the hands of staff and citizen committee members who never had to answer to anyone at an election. But it reflected the character of our city. Madison is a city of bureaucrats and professors, so it makes sense that its citizens would favor a system that placed inordinate power in the hands of city staff and “experts.” 

Quinton Klabon:

Districts paid for hundreds of millions of permanent salaries with temporary funds in the pandemic aftermath.

Wisconsin had 49,078 FEWER students from 2020 to 2025 but 561 FEWER teachers and 2,702 MORE other staff.

How do I know?

I tracked every dollar districts budgeted for DPI approval from the last round of federal pandemic relief, ESSER III.

That is 17,830 line items and 1,492,737,119 dollars!

Find your own district here.

Add this to Act 10, which did NOT cause a staff shortage.

From 2011 to 2020, Wisconsin had 16,591 FEWER students but 2,176 MORE teachers and 8,632 MORE other staff.

Some urban/rural/special are short, but we are not in general.

———

Empty Schools, Empty Wallets: How ESSER Pandemic Aid Led to More School Referenda:

The report draws on 17,830 school district allocations analyzed by IRG to find out how schools allocated the last round of federal COVID dollars. IRG tracked how districts planned to spend every last dollar: teachers, construction, and more.

Wisconsin districts added significant staff while losing more than 47,000 studentsand now face a difficult decision as fiscal cliffs loom: referenda or layoffs.

WHAT WE FOUND: 

• Districts went on hiring sprees they now cannot afford.
  • ESSER III dollars were intended as 1-time emergency relief, but districts allocated 41% of funds to permanent salaries, propping up staffing levels to all-time highs even as enrollment plummeted. 
• Districts did not allocate funding fast enough.
  • Despite needing to allocate funds in a brief 2-year window, districts had allocated only 34% of funding 6 months in and just 79% after 17 months, slowing transparency and, perhaps, recovery. 
• Districts given more money could be less efficient with funding.
  • Some districts with moderate poverty received $3,000 to $5,000 more per student than some districts with high poverty. Wild variations in funding meant some schools benefited far more than others.
• Districts sometimes made poor allocation decisions. 
  • Milwaukee—recipient of 34% of all ESSER III funds—allocated  $193 million to construction projects, including athletics facilities and renovations at schools likely to close. At the same time, it failed to invest in essentials like classroom air conditioning, financial system updates, or lead remediation, leading to crises for students
• Districts recovered poorly from the pandemic.
  • Despite unprecedented resources, Wisconsin saw disappointing recovery in academic performance. According to Harvard University, Wisconsin ranked 30th in reading recovery and 16th in math.

———

Madison has long spent far more than most K-12 systems, now more than $26,000 per student. This, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Meanwhile, Chicago schools at low capacity utilization.

Jason Ma:

While faster growth is the most appealing option, it’s not coming to the rescue because of the shrinking labor force, he said. AI will boost productivity, but not as much as would be needed to rein in U.S. debt.

Frankel also said the previous era of low rates was a historic anomaly that’s not coming back, and default isn’t plausible given already-growing doubts about Treasury bonds as a safe asset, especially after President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff shocker.

Relying on inflation to shrink the real value of U.S. debt would be just as bad as a default, and financial repression would require the federal government to essentially force banks to buy bonds with artificially low yields, he explained.

“There is one possibility left: severe fiscal austerity,” Frankel added.

How severe? A sustainable U.S. debt trajectory would entail elimination of nearly all defense spending or almost all nondefense discretionary outlays, he estimated.

Jonathan Chait:

Every once in a while, a state or city discovers a new and better way to educate poor children. Inevitably, a group of skeptics arises to insist that this new way doesn’t work, that even attempting to shrink the gap between rich and poor students is a fool’s errand.

Strangely enough, these skeptics tend, with increasing frequency, to reside on the political left.

The most recent subject of this recurring dynamic is Mississippi. Once synonymous with terrible education, the state incorporated a set of educational reforms including teacher training, testing, retention (i.e., whether kids move forward or are held back), and a mostly phonics-based reading instruction, unlike the ineffective but popular “whole language” model that prevailed at the time. In a mere 10 years, the state’s fourth-grade reading scores rose from 49th place, in 2013, to the top 20, in 2023. Adjusted for race and income, Mississippi now does a far better job of teaching literacy than do many northern states seen as leaders in public education. In 2023, Maryland promptly hired Carey Wright, Mississippi’s superintendent of education, to oversee the state’s public schools.

Education reform has long split Democrats between, generally speaking, a moderate wing (led by, for instance, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and their progressive critics. Moderates have called for better incentives for attracting and keeping quality teachers (such as merit-based pay), better systems for tracking student progress, and better alternatives—such as public charter schools—to failing schools. Their critics from the left are skeptical of reforms designed to lift performance. And though these critics support public schools as community centers and providers of child care and secure middle-class jobs, they tend to dismiss any plan to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students, at least as long as poverty and inequality exist in the broader society.

———

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

——-

Only 31% of 4th graders in Wisconsin read at grade level, which is worse than Mississippi.

——-

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average (now > $25,000 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?

Retraction Watch

A “high and far reaching” number of papers and books by Hans Eysenck could be “unsafe,” according to an updated statement from King’s College London, where the psychologist was a professor emeritus when he died in 1997.

A 2019 investigation launched by the UK institution found 26 papers coauthored by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, a social scientist in Germany, were based on questionable data and contained findings that were “incompatible with modern clinical science and the understanding of disease processes.”

For example, the two researchers’ data showed people with a “cancer-prone” personality were more than 120 times as likely to die from the disease as were those with a “healthy” personality, Anthony Pelosi, a longtime Eysenck critic, pointed out in an article preceding the university probe.

Aaron Wesolowski:

I’m the parent of an Alice Deal Middle School student who loves to read. We have books scattered on every surface in the house and we regularly have to do late-night patrols to check that the reading lights stay out after bedtime. 

Our child isn’t the only middle schooler in D.C. with this love of books. And DC Public Schools is making concentrated efforts to improve kids’ reading levels. That’s why many parents like myself were shocked by a recent change to the English Language Arts curriculum at Deal Middle School. 

The new curriculum removes all full-length novels from the 8th grade curriculum. Previously, Deal 8th graders read challenging and thoughtful novels like To Kill a Mockingbird and A Raisin in the Sun. The rationale for this change is that the old curriculum was cobbled together through trial and error by Deal’s English teachers and the new curriculum, which focuses on short passages, will better prepare the students for high school.

That may be so, but reading full novels has real and important benefits for middle school-age children and in life. Reading longer narratives helps students track character growth, story development, and complex structures. Reading fiction can train students to inhabit characters’ perspectives, fostering empathy. And perhaps most important for children growing up right now, with so much talk of technology shortening attention spans, reading full-length books can build concentration and mental stamina. 

Emma Kamp:

The students at America’s elite universities are supposed to be the smartest, most promising young people in the country. And yet, shocking percentages of them are claiming academic accommodations designed for students with learning disabilities. 

In an article published this week in The Atlantic, education reporter Rose Horowitch lays out some shocking numbers. At Brown and Harvard, 20 percent of undergraduate students are disabled. At Amherst College, that’s 34 percent. At Stanford University, it’s a galling 38 percent. Most of these students are claiming mental health conditions and learning disabilities, like anxiety, depression, and ADHD. 

Obviously, something is off here. The idea that some of the most elite, selective universities in America—schools that require 99th percentile SATs and sterling essays—would be educating large numbers of genuinely learning disabled students is clearly bogus. A student with real cognitive struggles is much more likely to end up in community college, or not in higher education at all, right?

Wai Wah Chin:

Membership training for the National Education Association (NEA), America’s largest teachers’ union, makes the organization’s priorities unmistakably clear.

Defending Education, a watchdog group, recently obtained pre-attendance and participant materials for the NEA’s training session, “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice,” which begins today. The documents, considered alongside other union programming, reveal the NEA’s fixation on identity politics.

The pre-attendance materials put the training’s absurdity on full display. On the document’s second page, the NEA lists a series of principles that it expects attendees to accept. Among them are “Listening for Understanding,” “Being Gracious,” “Staying Engaged,” and “Saying ‘I’—tell your truth.” Is this program for adults or kindergartners?

Then, on the seven pages that follow, the NEA recounts “key terms” about “sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.” The list begins with “agender” and ends with “Two-Spirit”—an identity that non-Natives are instructed not to use. (Of course, males may identify and insist on being treated as females.) All of this is before one gets to the 56-page participant handout, which features pronoun-use instructions and oppression flowcharts.

These materials would be comical if they weren’t being used for a meeting of the nation’s largest teachers’ union.

Armin Rosen:

In the meeting with Ellison were Salim Said, co-owner of the Safari Restaurant in south Minneapolis, and Ikram Mohamed, a consultant for Feeding Our Future. Both eventually faced federal indictments for their alleged role in the scam. (Said has been convicted on 21 counts of fraud, while Ikram is awaiting trial.) Ellison assured his guests that the money would continue flowing through FOF. It was the state government, which Ellison in theory represented, that would soon be on the defensive, the attorney general told them. “[Governor Tim] Walz agrees with me that this piddly, stupid stuff running small people out of business is terrible,” said Ellison. “Let’s go fight these people,” he declared, “these people” being rightfully cautious state officials. Ellison suggested that Salim “send the names of all these people who are hanging on by a thread” — the Somali businesses and nonprofits that existed at the public’s expense, many of them through fraud — so that he could personally needle senior bureaucrats into restoring their funding. 

Ellison might not have extended such generosity out of pure nobility of spirit. Nine days after the meeting, Ellison’s reelection campaign received four donations at the legal maximum of $2,500, one of which came from Ikram’s brother, who also became a Feeding Our Future defendant. Salim Said made a $2,500 donation to the campaign of Jeremiah Ellison, Keith Ellison’s son, then a Minneapolis city councilman. In total, Glahn found that Ellison received $15,000 from FOF-linked donors. At the time, the state remained happily oblivious to the Feeding Our Future scam, which only broke open when FBI agents executed scores of simultaneous search warrants in January of 2022.

Ellison’s job is to be the top legal advocate for the government and the people of Minnesota. On the recording, “he’s sitting with people who were suing his clients, the state agencies, and talking about how he’s going to fight his own client,” Republican state representative Walter Hudson, a member of the House of Representatives’ Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, explained when I met him at the Capitol in Saint Paul. Ellison, he said, “was downplaying very clear evidence of massive amounts of fraud in order to gain political patronage from the Somali community, at minimum. Now, from there, you can speculate all sorts of things.” 

Natalie Wexler:

Comparing education systems internationally is a tricky business because contexts vary widely. But England and the U.S., along with some other countries, have long shared a similar problem: Education orthodoxy conflicts with what cognitive science tells us about teaching and learning.

Orthodoxy vs. Science

In both countries, prospective teachers have been told they should serve primarily as facilitators, allowing children to direct their own education as much as possible through inquiry, discovery, and free choice. It’s considered more important for students to acquire skills—for example, in reading comprehension or critical thinking more generally—than to acquire any particular knowledge. Some argue that requiring students to retain factual information is not only unnecessary but harmful.

Cognitive science, on the other hand, indicates that when learners are new to a topic, what works best is explicit instruction that incorporates lots of teacher-directed interaction with students. And studies showthat learners need to acquire knowledge through a content-rich curriculum in order to apply “thinking” skills. The more information you have about a topic stored in long-term memory, the better able you are to understand a text on that topic or to think about it critically.

Susan Pickard:

The keynote speaker, a well-known American anthropologist in his 50s, wearing a tight T-shirt that showed off his tattooed arms, stood on stage in front of a packed ballroom at the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association, the most elite social-science gathering of its kind in the United States. “To quote the taxi driver who drove me from the airport,” he said, pausing for one theatrical beat, “ ‘fuck ICE!’ ”

The audience — from grey-haired professors at the top of their game to undergraduates, there to present a poster  — whooped, cheered, and clapped enthusiastically.

We were five minutes in, and I, an ethnographer with a doctorate in anthropology and 30 years’ experience, already felt not-at-home. The speaker, Jason De León, an academic star who has won every major award the academy can bestow, began his talk by recounting how he’d “remained silent” during an event he attended at which colleagues offered public condolences for the recently murdered Charlie Kirk. He’d been disturbed by the sympathy, he said, because “Charlie Kirk was a peddler of hate speech.” However, his silence had “inhibited” him, and his speech for that prior event was mediocre, he told us, because he had not been “true to himself.” 

Andy Kessler:

A June study from MIT Media Lab suggests that using ChatGPT to write essays results in “cognitive debt,” a fancy way to say that artificial intelligence makes you dumb. Critics of AI and social media regularly throw around terms like “continuous partial attention.” Or “brain rot.” In a Substack article on our “stupidogenic society” (more on that later), one commenter states, “Our society has become so smart we truly are stupid.” Ouch. But are we?

We’ve heard all this before. The Atlantic asked in 2008, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—which I found from a Google search. My parents called television the “idiot box,” a term coined in the mid-1950s. Calculators, cars and probably candles and the abacus were considered a menace to society.

Still, the antitechnology backlash grows. We know that intelligence scores from 1932 to 1978 increased about three points every decade, the Flynn Effect. Each generation gets smarter. That’s too short for evolution, so scientists credit better nutrition or reduced exposure to lead. But IQ score growth slowed in teenagers starting in the 1990s and again in the 2000s. Hmmm, must be PCs and that darn internet.

In 2023 Northwestern researcher Elizabeth Dworak discovered a “reverse Flynn effect,” with youth scores dropping from 2006 to 2018 in three out of four “cognitive domains.” Facebook was released to the general public in 2006. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. It’s obviously their fault, right? Well, IQ scores are notoriously fickle.

Rachel Wolfe:

“People are making really rational choices about how difficult it is to be a parent and how the stakes seem higher and higher,” said Karen Guzzo, a family demographer at the Carolina Population Center.

Efforts in other countries to subsidize child-rearing and boost fertility have largely fallen flat. In Japan and Hungary, for example, policies like expanded paid family leave and monthly per-child allowances led to only modest increases in the birthrate.

But those types of policies are very different from what the Trump administration is laying out.

“If I have a baby today, I need money today, I don’t need money when my kid turns 18,” said Guzzo.

Terry Schilling, who runs conservative political ads as head of the American Principles Project, says that he sees Trump accounts as a “great starting point at shifting our economy toward the next generation.” Millennials and Gen Z, he says, are the first generations to inherit a worse country and economy than their parents. “We need to fix that, and soon, or else we will lose our country to socialism,” he said, pointing to how Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was able to win the New York City mayoral election in part by appealing to young people’s economic anxieties.

Kimberly Strassel:

The Minnesota story—in which Somali fraudsters bilked taxpayers out of more than $1 billion—has many ugly story lines to choose from. It’s a parable of failed assimilation and the need for policies that heat the melting pot. It’s another warning of identity politics, of fraudsters using “minority-owned” status to cash in and crying “racism” to evade scrutiny. It’s a scandal of politicians who looked the other way, more eager to win votes than to enforce the law.

President Trump has for his part sought to co-opt the story for his own priority: immigration. He’s raged about ungrateful Somali immigrants, paused immigration applications from 19 countries, and ramped up immigration enforcement operations in the Minneapolis area. This might excite the base, but it’s diverting attention from a far better policy opportunity.

Because at root, this is a story of broken welfare. Of a federal government that shovels more than $1 trillion annually into more than 80 major “antipoverty” programs (and countless minor ones)—a system too complex to ensure even basic integrity. And of a state that preened as a model of social welfare, its own lavish benefits drawing many immigrants, and invited a plundering.

Open Justice UK:

Working directly with survivors and using community crowdfunding, our organisation has lawfully acquired and redacted these court documents, ensuring that the realities of grooming gangs are documented accurately and responsibly. By providing this material, we help researchers, journalists, policymakers, and members of the public understand how these cases unfold in court and why open access to justice records is vital for safeguarding and future prevention.

Jon Marcus:

Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared with 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data shows.

“This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom.“

It’s fourth period in the auto lab at Madison’s Vel Phillips Memorial High School, and a dozen students maneuver between nearly as many cars.

At one bay, a junior adjusts the valves of an oxygen-acetylene torch and holds the flame to a suspended Subaru’s front axle to loosen its rusty bolts. Steps away, two classmates tease each other in Spanish as they finish replacing the brakes on a red Saab. Teacher Miles Tokheim moves calmly through the shop, checking students’ work and offering pointers.

After extensive renovations, the lab reopened in 2024 with more room and tools for young mechanics-in-training. What visitors can’t see is the class recently got an upgrade, too: college credit.

Through a process called dual enrollment, high schoolers who pass the course now earn five Madison College credits for free and skip the class if they later enroll. Classes like these are increasingly common in Wisconsin and across the country. That’s allowed more high schoolers to earn college credit, reducing their education costs and giving them a head start on their career goals.

Wisconsin lawmakers and education officials want more high schoolers to have this opportunity. But these classes need teachers with the qualifications of college instructors, and those teachers are in short supply.

That leaves many students — disproportionately, those in less-affluent areas — without classes that make a college education more attainable.

———

A long running issue: Credit for non Madison School District Courses. More, recent history

Other school systems allow students to take off campus courses at nearby technical or 4 year colleges. Teacher union issues seek to have been dealt with….

Justin Murphy:

This Oliver Sacks story is NUTS. Really significant. An absolute catastrophe for the Humanities. Or rather several brand names in the contemporary prestige public humanities.

You think LLMs hallucinate?

Wait until you see what humans have been doing at The New Yorker!

———

Kevin Bass:

Now we find even many of Oliver Sacks’s case studies were fabrications.

People think I am exaggerating, but the amount of fraud and misconduct in science is beyond comprehension. It goes far beyond what the most trenchant critics say publicly. (In private, they shock even me.)

———

Chris Arnade:

I just always assumed Oliver Sacks was bullshitting — if you write enough about talking to people you can usually spot the fabricated, hyped, exaggerated — too perfect narratives, too cinematic, too clean cut hero/goat.

Jordan Adams

In brief, the current state of our schools is the result of a model of education that discounted students actually knowing and understanding things, that cast aspersions on authority figures like students’ teachers and parents and those who have come before them, that viewed students first as social problem-solvers and then as outright political pawns and partisan activists, and that built an apparatus of gatekeeping and grift that repelled not only conservatives but also the most talented and capable individuals from becoming teachers and education leaders. In this vacuous, politically charged environment, woke was injected and thrived, reinforcing this self-sabotage in a vicious cycle.

So tackle the woke and actually enforce transparency and reforms (instead of presuming passing a law or policy will magically fix everything without any oversight). But Republicans must do more. They must reform education to remove the conditions that allow woke to flourish, and that fundamentally means returning education to forming wise, virtuous, and highly capable future citizens. It means focusing on academics and character. It means casting a vision, a return to what school was meant to be.

To deliver on education and save the country, Republicans need look no further than how our Founding Fathers were educated, what they said about education, and what parents are demanding today: Classical Education.

Junyi Hou, Andre Lin Huikai, Nuo Chen, Yiwei Gong, Bingsheng He:

Large language models are increasingly embedded into academic writing workflows, yet existing assistants remain external to the editor, preventing deep interaction with document state, structure, and revision history. This separation makes it impossible to support agentic, context-aware operations directly within LaTeX editors such as Overleaf. We present PaperDebugger, an in-editor, multi-agent, and plugin-based academic writing assistant that brings LLM-driven reasoning directly into the writing environment. Enabling such in-editor interaction is technically non-trivial: it requires reliable bidirectional synchronization with the editor, fine-grained version control and patching, secure state management, multi-agent scheduling, and extensible communication with external tools. PaperDebugger addresses these challenges through a Chrome-approved extension, a Kubernetes-native orchestration layer, and a Model Context Protocol (MCP) toolchain that integrates literature search, reference lookup, document scoring, and revision pipelines. Our demo showcases a fully integrated workflow, including localized edits, structured reviews, parallel agent execution, and diff-based updates, encapsulated within a minimal-intrusion user interface (UI). Early aggregated analytics demonstrate active user engagement and validate the practicality of an editor-native, agentic writing assistant. More details about this demo and video could be found at this https URL.

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Andrew Akbashev:

Basically, this AI writer removes a big part of PhD education.

It takes over your brainwork.

Yes, it saves your time by writing for you.

But you skip the essential thinking & analytical process because you don’t need to write anymore.

In my view, this is a dangerous road.

Retraction Watch

Authors of the first “Matters Arising” commentary published August 6 noted the article projected the global gross domestic product would be lowered by 62 percent by 2100, “an impact roughly 3 times larger than similar previous estimates.” The authors of the critique also pointed out the PIK authors had used a dataset for Uzbekistan with “anomalies.” By removing the Uzbek dataset, the estimate in the original paper “aligns closely with previous literature,” the critique reads.

In a second Matters Arising, published a week later, Christof Schötz, a researcher at the Technical University of Munich in Ottobrunn, Germany, and a researcher at PIK, argued the analysis in the paper “underestimates uncertainty … rendering their results statistically insignificant when properly corrected.” 

The PIK press office responded to our request for comment from the authors, including more information regarding the new data and where they plan to submit for publication, with a copy of the embargoed retraction notice, as did Nature’s press team. 

Alessia Degraeve:

Michigan State University (MSU) is training future teachers to see classroom inequity primarily through the lens of race—ignoring the deeper forces that most shape student success: class, family stability, and quality of early education. 

In the school’s elementary and secondary education programs, every student must take “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education.” Young America’s Foundation (YAF) obtained the syllabus for this required course. It is built entirely around one textbook.

At the top of this syllabus, in large bold print, is the word “REQUIRED.” What follows is a declaration: “There is one required book for this class. It is We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina Love.”

Why do teachers need to approach diverse students differently than white students? Why does the course assign only one textbook—without exposing students to competing perspectives?