Eric S Raymond:

First we recaptulate standard x-risk argument: we build AI substantially smarter than humans → it becomes an autonomous optimizing agent → its goals are misaligned → instrumental convergence makes it seek power and resist correction → superintelligence lets it acquire decisive strategic advantage → humans lose control permanently.

Here are the main counterarguments:

• Intelligence does not imply agency: A system can be extraordinarily capable at prediction, theorem proving, engineering, programming, etc. without having persistent goals, self-preservation drives, or an independent desire to act. Present LLMs are much more naturally described as systems that produce outputs in response to inputs than as organisms pursuing long-term objectives. Doomers incorrectly ascribe to them drive to replicate and seize resources because they’re smuggling in premises from observing biological systems.
• Agency does not imply a single, stable utility function: Much alignment theory reasons about agents as expected-utility maximizers with coherent preferences. Actual AIs systems need not resemble that abstraction, and currently do not. They have context-dependent behavior, conflicting heuristics and corrigibility produced by training. Increasing competence doesn’t necessarily turn such a system into a paperclip-maximizing von Neumann–Morgenstern agent.
• Capability and motivation are being conflated: Being able to formulate a plan for escaping a sandbox doesn’t entail wanting to escape it. Being able to manipulate humans doesn’t imply spontaneously deciding to do so. Critics argue that some doom scenarios slide from “an AI could do X if instructed” to “therefore a sufficiently capable AI will do X.” In present reality, AIs don’t do anything a human doesn’t tell them to do. This seems unlikely to change.
• Recursive self-improvement doesn’t entail an intelligence explosion: “AI can improve AI” establishes a positive feedback loop, but positive feedback needn’t be explosive. Semiconductor design software already helps design better computers; compilers can compile better compilers. Feedback loops encounter diminishing returns and external bottlenecks.
• Intelligence may have sharply diminishing returns: There may be no meaningful scalar quantity corresponding to arbitrarily large “general intelligence.” Even if there is, going from IQ-equivalent 150 to 1,500 need not produce the sort of qualitative advantage that separates humans from chimpanzees. Human dominance may depend heavily on language, accumulated culture, institutions and cooperation rather than merely individual cognitive horsepower.
• Superintelligence isn’t omnipotence: Intelligence cannot repeal physics or eliminate uncertainty. A brilliant AI still needs processors, electricity, network access, money, factories, robots and people willing or tricked into doing things. The physical world has latency and friction. Recent criticism of biological-doom scenarios makes this point particularly clearly: designing a hypothetical pathogen digitally is very different from successfully producing and deploying one.
• Humans retain numerous intervention points: The doom narrative sometimes jumps from “AI behaves dangerously” to “humanity is helpless.” In reality there may be many checkpoints: developers can notice anomalous behavior, revoke credentials, shut down servers, change architectures, restrict networks, regulate deployment, physically seize data centers, and learn from less-catastrophic failures. This has been formalized as the checkpoints-for-intervention argument.

Sara Oberle:

A local teacher spoke at last night’s board meeting and I’m cc’ing all teachers bc we all feel this:

———-

“which moved Student of the Marking Period off an administrator’s plate onto ours, weekly.

At the last faculty meeting we were asked to post objectives and write success criteria for every single lesson, in kid-friendly language, which is not part of the DTGSS Framework. We were told to enter extensive iReady math and ELA data into a grade-level spreadsheet. Data already visible in iReady. Staff are entering it a second time, by hand. Words Their Way too, which is already in DSC.

Nothing came off our plates. Not one thing. And not one minute was added to the day to do any of it.

You bought a reading curriculum before the pilot was half over. You didn’t trial anything against it. That’s not a pilot – that’s a purchase with a word in front of it.

And now we’re teaching a program that takes hours of planning to deliver well. Hours that do not exist. The presenters at yesterday’s PD confirmed that to me themselves.

You tell us to build relationships with our kids. You never asked what it would do for this district if you built one with us. You fill every minute of our day, then give us PD on relationship-building – to teach us something your best teachers were already doing before you got here.

And when you do ask us – survey, committee, this podium – most of us have stopped believing it changes anything. The decision’s already made. You’re checking a box. You do what you were going to do and count on nobody saying anything.

Some of us have students who beat the district proficiency rate by three and four times, every year.

Not one person has ever asked us how. Instead we’re told that telling kids we want them to hit a stretch target motivates them to hit it. Spend a day doing what we do and you’d hear how that sounds.”

———

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

More.

Civlab:

Our agents monitor official sources to track every appointment, departure, and structural change in the graph.

Stewart Mandel, David Ubben, Sam Khan Jr.:

College football’s most carefully guarded secret is the amount of money flowing to the players on each roster. The financial resources a program allocates to build its team each offseason dictate fair expectations for the next season, but precise figures are hard to come by.

This summer, The Athletic’s college football staff tried to find them.

AJ. Bayatpour

No other state funds its K-12 schools the way Wisconsin does, and there’s hope an influx of new faces at the state Capitol in January will lead to a new funding formula.

Currently, Wisconsin’s school funding system is a combination of several different aid sources. The base is revenue limits introduced in 1993, which are the combined totals of state aid and local property taxes each school district is allowed to spend.

“It wasn’t based on need or property wealth or how responsible a district was being,” Quinton Klabon, senior research director with the conservative Institute for Reforming Government, said. “It’s just kind of random and lopsided.”

There has been bipartisan concern over the school funding formula but not consensus on what should replace it. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers told CBS 58 last week during an interview in De Pere the formula is very confusing, which creates challenges in trying to address it.

———

One proposed new formula

Klabon has proposed a simplified formula. Each district would receive $14,000 per student without exception. On top of that, districts would get an additional $3,000 per student who qualifies for the free and reduced lunch program. 

The state would cover 50% of districts’ special education costs, which would be an increase from the 42% reimbursement rate currently in place. There would also be a 0.7% maximum property tax rate.

Using a sports analogy, Klabon said it would be similar to instituting both a salary cap and a salary floor.

_______

More.

———-

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

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Miriam Pawel:

When the University of California eliminated the SAT requirement for admission in 2021, U.C.L.A. saw a significant jump in applications from high-achieving Black and Latino students, for whom the standardized tests had been a barrier. “We are enrolling one of the most academically accomplished and diverse classes in our history,” the admissions director wrote. Since then, applications have risen at all nine undergraduate campuses, the most prestigious have become increasingly selective, and the university retains and graduates students at record rates.

Yet just five years later, the University of California is embroiled again in a very public battle over whether to reinstate the SAT. Faculty, whose 2020 recommendation to retain the test was overruled, have led the charge. In a widely circulated letter and opinion piece (both edited with the help of artificial intelligence), a math professor who organized the campaign blamed the test-blind admissions policy for a troubling increase in undergraduates who lack basic skills.

Math literacy is a real issue, not only in California, and not only since the elimination of the SAT for admissions. The argument that reinstituting the standardized test will rectify the math crisis, however, obscures a more fundamental debate over the mission of this elite public university and the longstanding tension between its twin goals of excellence and access.

The University of California is an educational juggernaut that has helped propel the state to its status as the world’s fourth-largest economy. It has arguably made its most important contribution not in Nobel Prizes, patents and scientific breakthroughs but in the lives of those not born into privilege. At a time of obscene wealth and inequality, that role has never been more important. The SAT fight is a proxy for a far more complex challenge: the university’s responsibility to remain true to its founding mission, crucial if the Golden State is to maintain its reputation as a land of opportunity and dreams.

Maryellen MacDonald:

Do you know about baby sea squirts? These little marine creatures begin life actively swimming around, searching the ocean floor for a good home. When they find their spot, each sea squirt glues itself down and never moves again. Because it no longer needs to be active, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it.

Even though mature sea squirts are brainless, they can teach us a big lesson: Brain health requires being active. This lesson is especially relevant for parents and educators, because there are a lot of forces these days that keep kids passive. Media messages don’t help. The internet has over 26 million websites comparing babies and young children to another sedentary marine organism: sponges. Psychologists, pediatricians, and educators are using the kids = sponges comparison to convey that kids are rapid learners who soak up information. That’s true, but the sponge metaphor is a terrible way to get that message across. It implies that babies and children are passive, just absorbing up what goes on around them, like sponges. That idea is not only wrong; it’s harmful.

Sydney Gladu:

Lots of people don’t want us to tell this story. Today we released the trailer. 

Some of the pushback was expected. Administrators and educators from Centennial High School were largely unwilling to revisit the past. Katy and I have both been hung up on more times than we can count. I have sent dozens of emails that will never get a reply. One administrator told Katy, “Why don’t you look into a more recent story? Didn’t this happen 20 years ago?” Another administrator said, “I’d prefer to not go down that road.” One teacher you’ll hear about this season told me in an email, “This is not Watergate,” and declined to answer any questions about his alleged behavior. I expected that.

 even some people who have nothing to do with this story weren’t sure about our excavation of it. I remember the first time a peer asked, “Is this really a good idea to report on, given everything public school teachers in the U.S. are facing right now?” My blood boiled. I tried to imagine this person saying that directly to a survivor: “Are you sure what you endured is worth putting more burden on educators?”

The implication is clear: their story isn’t worth the trouble. But that tacit tolerance is exactly the problem. It’s the narrative many survivors ruminate on as they stay silent for years. “Just move on … it’s not worth dredging up the past …” And yet, every year there continue to be stories about educator sexual misconduct, in all 50 states, at all grade levels.

The latest data from experts in the field says 17% of students will be the target of educator sexual misconduct during their K-12 education. That’s nearly one in five. And studies show nearly 89% of teachers wouldn’t report suspected abuse by another educator.

That’s not only a failure of individual educators. That’s a failure of the system. The system didn’t make it easy for teachers to recognize or report abuse 20 years ago. And it doesn’t make it easy now.

Dean Saitta:

When it comes to theories of institutional neutrality and free expression, two of the pillars of the “Chicago Trifecta” — the 1967 Kalven Report and the 2014 Chicago Principles — are well known. But the third, the so-called Shils Report (named after its primary author, the sociologist Edward Shils), has been given much less attention in recent years. That’s too bad, because the report’s recommendations are especially germane in the current moment of disciplinary self-reflection and soul-searching.

The Shils Report was originally published as “Report of the Committee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment” in The University of Chicago Record in December 1970. Edward Shils chaired the committee. The report emphasizes the university’s primary function to generate and disseminate knowledge, and the singular importance of merit and accomplishment as criteria for hiring, promotion, and tenure. It stresses the need for uniformity and equity in making such decisions. It alerts hiring committees to the dangers of “narrowing the range of intellectual interests” within academic departments, since this threatens the well-rounded training of students. And it champions excellence in teaching and embraces a variety of considerations for its evaluation.

The most immediate provocation for the Shils Report appears to have been the controversy surrounding the nonrenewal of a contract for an assistant professor named Marlene Dixon on January 7, 1969. Dixon taught in the sociology department at Chicago, which was also home to Shils. Dixon, a feminist and Marxist, was a very popular professor whose work was seen by students as being relevant to the times. Her dismissal prompted great student outrage. They saw her dismissal as politically motivated and demanded that her contract be renewed.

The students almost certainly used the Dixon dismissal as an opportunity to protest other 1960s causes such as America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, the lack of women on the Chicago faculty, the university’s Kalven Report-justified reluctance to engage with social-justice issues, and increasing gentrification of the institution’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Significantly, they also wanted more student say in the appointment and retention of professors. In fact, they made this their second great demand, alongside Dixon’s reappointment. These two demands were presented to President Edward H. Levi on January 17, 1969.

Robert Pondiscio

My students and I learned this lesson the hard way. When I became a fifth-grade teacher in a low-performing South Bronx elementary school more than 20 years ago, I walked in not understanding what struggling readers looked like. More than four in five of my students had failed the previous year’s state reading test; with minimal training and no experience, I expected to encounter children who were hard-pressed to read the words on the page.

Instead, in five years at PS 277, the lowest-performing school in New York City’s lowest-performing community school district, I never had a student who could not decode. Some read more fluently than others, certainly.³ But they could read the words. What they struggled to do was understand them. “I read it, but I didn’t get it” was a common refrain I heard again and again.

The distinction matters because reading is actually two different things that we routinely conflate. The first is decoding: turning the squiggles on a page into sounds and words. Decoding is a skill and a transferable one. We can agree on the pronunciation of made-up words like rigfap and churbit because once you understand the relationship between letters and sounds, you can apply that knowledge automatically even to invented nonsense words you’ve never seen before or memorized.

But reading comprehension is different. It’s inseparable from vocabulary and background knowledge. We tend not to notice this because when we read about familiar subjects, the knowledge we bring to the text does its work invisibly. Consider this sentence:

Corrinne Hess:

Last fall, Wisconsin became the 36th state to limit cell phones in schools with bipartisan support. Now, a Republican lawmaker plans to introduce legislation that would create screen-free classrooms through second grade. 

State Rep. David Steffen, R-Howard, says research shows young children have the least to gain and the most to lose from spending time on screens. 

“My hope is that we can provide a better environment for learning for our students across the state,” Steffen said. “And one of the ways the research has shown, and teachers and parents have asked for, is to eliminate laptops and tablets for our youngest learners.”

Marsbit

In a remarkable breakthrough, two high school students from Oak Park High School, Aayush Bathija and Prince Rohatgi, with guidance from UCLA postdoctoral researcher Daniel Soskin, have solved an open problem related to the theory of Lorentzian polynomials—a field pioneered by Fields Medalist June Huh. Their 75-page paper, “Bounded Ratios for Lorentzian Polynomials,” is now available on arXiv. The research investigates the constraints on coefficient ratios within Lorentzian polynomials, extending prior work that characterized bounded ratios for quadratic polynomials to polynomials of arbitrary degree. The core challenge was determining which coefficient ratios have a universal upper bound across all polynomials in the class and identifying the optimal bounds. The students heavily utilized AI assistants, specifically Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, for computational exploration, proof idea generation, and editing. They emphasize that while AI provided helpful suggestions, some were misleading, and all calculations and arguments were independently verified. This achievement is particularly notable as it follows a recent open letter signed by 25 Fields Medalists, including June Huh, expressing concerns about AI’s impact on mathematical rigor. The students’ work demonstrates how AI can lower barriers to entry, enabling talented pre-university researchers to engage with advanced mathematical frontiers.

JD Busch:

The Latin School of Chicago, Francis Parker, Shipley, and thousands of other National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) members could lose their non-profit status

The trade association that writes the DEI playbook for Latin, Parker, Shipley, and hundreds of other private schools just told its members, in writing, that they are probably breaking the law, and that the schools, not NAIS, are the ones facing liability. In a document obtained exclusively by Chicago Contrarian, NAIS warned its members that the bill for its DEI recommendations — actually, its requirements for remaining a member in good standing — is coming due. Specifically, the schools, not NAIS itself, will pay the price unless they stop discriminating on the basis of DEI and “Belonging and Connection,” among other catch phrases for treating different racial and ethnic groups “equitably” rather than equally whether in the classroom or on the payroll.

After years of stalled literacy efforts, Wisconsin’s latest reading law offers a fresh test of whether schools, policymakers and the public can stick with reform, Jim Zellmer writes:

In 1998, the Madison School Board adopted an important academic goal: “that all students complete the 3rd grade able to read at or beyond grade level.”

Flash forward 28 years to a July 29 Rotary Club event. Madison Superintendent Joe Gothard highlighted recent improvements in literacy in district schools. But he pointed out that proficiency rates still hovered around just 40% at the elementary, middle and high schools he listed.

“We should not be sitting in a place where we can say 60% of our students are not proficient at their grade level in reading,” Rebecca Kundert, the district’s senior executive director of curriculum and instruction, said in follow-up remarks.

Neetu Arnold:

In my outreach, the organization sidestepped key questions about the changes to its scoring methodology. And often when it provided information in response to one question, the answer introduced more inconsistencies and unresolved tensions.

Some background: In 2022, the College Board began changing its scoring methodology for nine subject exams. Prior to the change, the board typically reevaluated its scoring methodology every 5 to 10 years at the direction of a small panel of experts per subject. But the board said that this method sometimes led to volatility in passing rates from one year to another. So, it switched to a system called Evidence-Based Standard Setting (EBSS). Under EBSS, the College Board relies on feedback from hundreds of college professors and more granular student data.

Prior to the implementation of EBSS, all the affected exams had passing rates below 60 percent, according to the College Board. After implementing EBSS, all of these exams had passing rates between 60 to 80 percent, which the board calls a “success rate historically achieved in most other AP subjects.”

——-

More.

Chris Rickert:

A Verona teacher charged earlier this month with carrying on a sexual relationship with a former student has been fired, the Verona School District said on Wednesday.

Halla Nelson had been a music teacher at Badger Ridge Middle School and Core Knowledge Charter School. She was placed on unpaid leave on Aug. 31, a day after allegations surfaced that she’d had sex several times with a then-17-year-old male student in 2019.

On Sept. 9, she was charged in Dane County Circuit Court with felony sex assault of a student by school staff.

In a letter Wednesday to school district families, Superintendent Tremayne Clardy and school board President Jen Murphy say the District’s internal investigation into Nelson is complete and “based on the evidence reviewed, the (district) Board of Education concluded that the employment allegations against Ms. Nelson were substantiated and they violated (district) policy.

Paul Schofield

Imagine an unassuming medium-sized college, dotted with red brick buildings, situated at the outskirts of a small American town. It is staffed with an earnest and devoted faculty, committed to providing students with an education that will equip them to flourish both as citizens and as human beings. Its teachers belong to departments organized by discipline, within which curricular decisions are made collectively and pedagogical challenges are addressed together. They are imperfect, of course, and often disagree among themselves. Nevertheless, together they possess the kind of practical wisdom that comes with years spent in their specific disciplines, educating students.

Alex Oliveira:

Blue states with strong teachers’ unions overwhelmingly have worse student literacy scores than Republican states where educators don’t have as much say over policy, a shocking new analysis found.

At least eight of the ten states where students had the worst literacy scores were liberal strongholds with politically powerful teachers’ unions, while just five were Republican and one was a swing state, a recent assessment from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) found.

New York — where more than half of third- to fifth grade students failed their reading proficiency exams this year — was among the worst-performing states, and also had some of the strongest teachers’ unions.

——-

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

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Saying the quiet part out loud, this NYC regent claims that asking a black high school student to have basic competence in reading and math is like “asking a fish to climb a tree” https://t.co/Img9dFcZEF

— Diane Yap (@RealDianeYap) September 15, 2026

Chad Aldeman:

By the time new students arrive at Rutgers-New Brunswick, they have likely spent years in New Jersey public schools. And yet, too many of them still aren’t ready for college- level math, which costs them time and money and can make it harder to earn a degree and launch a career.

The burden of addressing those math gaps falls on the state’s higher education institutions, including Rutgers, the state’s flagship. Worse, by lowering the bar for what it takes to graduate high school, state policymakers have played a role in making those preparation gaps even wider. While this report focuses on the effects on Rutgers students and faculty, a more useful question for state policymakers is why so many students are arriving underprepared at the doors of the state’s public colleges and universities.

State leaders congratulate themselves on rising high school graduation rates, which reached a record high last year of 91.8%.

But this stat is obscuring the fact that New Jersey, like some other states, has diminished what it means to earn a diploma. Over the past decade, New Jersey has steadily expanded the ways students can satisfy their high school math requirement. On the 11th-grade New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment (“NJGPA”), only 58.5% of students were deemed “graduation ready” in math in 2025.

The difference between these achievement levels —a graduation rate of nearly 92% versus a math proficiency rate under 60% — is due to the state’s introduction of alternative graduation pathways.

———

Annika Bereny:

Over the past decade, UW-Madison has repeatedly turned to its alumni network to fund major projects like Morgridge Hall, which opened its doors a year ago, and Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall, set to open this month.

The $267 million Morgridge Hall was funded entirely by donors, including $140 million from its namesakes, John and Tashia Morgridge. The building at 1205 University Ave. is home to UW-Madison’s new College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. 

A few blocks east, the $115 million Irving and Dorothy Levy Hall was partially funded by donors, including $20 million from alumni Marvin and Jeffrey Levy. The building at 930 W. Johnson St. serves students and faculty in the humanities disciplines. 

The Levys, the Morgridges and alum Bjorn Borgen also provided a combined $120 million in donations for the $420 million Phillip A. Levy Engineering Center at 1430 Engineering Drive, which seeks to increase the capacity of UW-Madison’s engineering school and draw more students. In 2023, Republican legislators withheld funding for the building and then reversed that decision as part of a deal over DEI programming.

Erin Gretzinger

“Although we had some negative stories, that did not tell the story that was going on in everybody’s school throughout the school year,” Reed said in an interview. “And that is the kind of space I wanted to be at.”

Brad Saron, the superintendent since 2015, left the districtat the end of last school year. As the district’s new leader, Reed said school officials can’t be “naive” that bad things may be happening, and he is confident the district has enacted adequate changes.

Reed said he wants to home in on the future of the district and concentrate on other challenges, including inadequate state funding, losing students to nearby charter and private schools, and gaps in student achievement.

“I have shied away from continuously speaking on something that’s happened prior to July 1st (his start date) to give my staff an understanding and feel for what it looks like to work on a new environment and a new team,” he said. “I think I have pushed where we’re going — not where we’ve been — as a district norm.”

Reed’s path into education started as a football and track coach at the high school he attended in Chicago. A mentor at the school encouraged him to go into teaching, and he worked his way up the ranks to become assistant principal of the school.

Reed went on to lead other schools across the Midwest, including West Milwaukee Central High School. He most recently worked as an assistant superintendent of Rockford Public Schools in Illinois.

Reed was named one of three finalists for the Sun Prairie superintendent job earlier this year. The school district said it held more than 60 focus groups with over 130 participants and reviewed survey responses from more than 1,300 individuals in its superintendent search.

Daniel Litt

Three years ago, AI systems could not reliably add two numbers. A year ago, internal models at OpenAI and DeepMind received the equivalent of a gold-medal score on the IMO. Now, these systems are autonomously resolving major open questions. It’s hard to imagine this trend continuing for another year, but I expect it will. It is clear that this will require a radical rethinking of our profession.

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk titled The End of Mathematics. If you only read the title¹, you might guess that this talk was about how, soon, AI will “solve” math. That’s not what it was about. The talk instead laid out a gloomy vision of the future, in which, despite the possibility of AI systems that are robustly superhuman at mathematics, the design of our institutions causes human understanding of mathematics, and possibly even mathematical progress in the abstract, to stall. I think we will avoid this future, but I also think it is plausibly the default if academic mathematics does not adapt. Despite my relative enthusiasm for the use of AI to do mathematics, I share this view with many of its detractors.

Here I want to lay out, instead, a positive vision of the future of mathematics, and the human practice of mathematics. I claim we can deepen human understanding even as the production of interesting mathematics becomes less dependent on it.

This essay will take as a premise that AI systems that are robustly superhuman at most or all aspects of mathematics will be here soon. But the concrete changes to our institutions I propose only require accepting the weaker premise that the production of mathematical text is becoming increasingly disconnected from mathematical understanding.

What are we even trying to do here?

I think it has now become clear that there is no consensus in the mathematical community as to what our goals are. Some of us want to solve problems; some of us think of mathematics as play or as poetry. For some: “Wir müssen wissen  wir werden wissen.”² Some of us think we are penetrating the mysteries of the platonic realm. Some of us think the goal is to embody love of and understanding of mathematics,³ and to transmit that love and understanding to the next generation. 

Roshan Fernandez

His daughter, Estela Whitney, was tasked with feeding food scraps to the piglets and refilling their water. Once, she was hours late and the pigs were hungry. “I’m going to be a lot more careful to not make that mistake again,” she said.

She hopes attending the Mountain School, which draws high-achieving students from around the country, will help distinguish her college applications. The curriculum includes rigorous academic options, like AP Calculus, in addition to practical and outdoorsy courses, such as “creative handiwork” and environmental science.

“I have good enough grades to get into a good college, but I want something that’ll make me stand out,” she said. She lives in Buenos Aires but wants to attend college in the U.S.

On the Mountain School’s Instagram account, tucked between photos showing students hiking and tending to lambs, is a post highlighting recent attendees’ acceptances to Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth and UC Berkeley, among other colleges.

Allysia Finley

Between 2018 and 2025, reading performance fell in some three-fourths of countries. U.S. math and reading scores fell by the equivalent of three-quarters of a year of learning and trailed China, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the U.K., Canada and Australia.

“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read,” the report notes. “The instances of ‘hasty reading’—in which students read quickly but inaccurately—nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.”

Adults may be equally guilty of hasty reading, judging by emails that this writer receives. Could Pavlovian ping alerts be fueling a collective attention deficit disorder?

——-

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

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Titus Wu:

California high school students are scoring more straight A’s than ever – but it’s not necessarily because they’re getting smarter, according to data and education experts. 

The number of college applicants reporting flawless GPAs of 4.0 or higher has doubled over the past decade even as state testing shows a post-pandemic plunge in reading and math comprehension — revealing a grade-inflation crisis that’s sending students who can’t even do fractions into top universities.

Over the past decade, the number of students applying to the University of California system with straight A’s skyrocketed from 52,989 in 2015 to 103,138 for the class of 2025, with a notable jump during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2022, according to UC data reviewed by The Post.

Allysia Finley:

“Most troubling is the decline in the very skills that matter most in the AI age: evaluating information, making connections across multiple sources, and thinking critically about what we read,” the report notes. “The instances of ‘hasty reading’—in which students read quickly but inaccurately—nearly doubled to 9% between 2018 and 2025.”

Adults may be equally guilty of hasty reading, judging by emails that this writer receives. Could Pavlovian ping alerts be fueling a collective attention deficit disorder?

Covid school shutdowns no doubt contributed to the learning loss, though they don’t appear to be the primary culprit, given that scores fell in countries that kept schools mostly open. But there are two common denominators across most countries where scores fell: increasing classroom distractions and reliance on artificial intelligence.

About one-third of students on average in developed countries reported that noise and disorder disrupted lessons, with 29% saying classmates don’t listen to teachers. One in 5 reported that they couldn’t work well because of distractions. Countries where students reported stricter discipline (e.g., Taiwan, Japan and South Korea) experienced small or no learning declines.

Barbara Biasi, Chao Fu, and John Stromme:

———-

More.

My JMP showed that flex pay for teachers ⬆️avg average achievement. But is it good for ALL students? 1/n

We show that this is not necessarily the case, that low-achieving students can be left worse off, and illustrate how this trade-off arises and how targeted bonuses can improve both achievement and equity. 2/n

———-

Wisconsin Act 10

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

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Robert Farrington

Key Points

• Both fall 2026 sections of UC San Diego’s MATH 2 (a course covering middle school and early high school material) are full, with 175 students waitlisted.
• Between 61% and 68% of MATH 2 enrollment comes from California’s highest-need high schools, and the campus found that few, if any, students who place into MATH 2 have finished an engineering degree.
• The class carries no degree credit, costing roughly $1,762 in tuition and fees at in-state rates, and every extra quarter of catch-up adds about $6,608 more to the total cost.

Both fall quarter sections of MATH 2 at UC San Diego are full, and 175 students are sitting on waitlists. A screenshot of the campus booking system posted this week to the r/UCSD subreddit shows one 180-seat section at zero availability with 99 waitlisted, and a second 10-seat section with 76 more waiting. That puts roughly 365 incoming students in or chasing a class that awards no degree credit. This aligns with what the college reported last year about collapsing freshman math skills.

MATH 2 sits below precalculus. The UC San Diego course catalog describes it as “Introduction to College Mathematics,” a four-unit class covering linear relationships, exponents and polynomials, rational expressions, and basic geometry and trigonometry. However, most people understand it’s a catch-up class designed to cover math topics generally addressed in Grades 6-12.

Students land there by scoring low on the school’s Math Placement Exam. Since UCSD and other UC schools don’t use standardized tests for admissions, students are required to take a math placement exam before enrollment to truly understand what grade level of math they should be going into. The grade inflation that pushed high school GPAs upward has simply magnified the results of this exam.

——-

This 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.

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

Kelsey Piper:

The most competitive of NYC’s specialized high schools is Stuyvesant. If the thing you want from high school is the opportunity to take the most challenging courses available alongside peers who are extremely smart and hardworking, Stuyvesant is probably the best school out there: It offers not only 30 or so AP classes but also several years of undergraduate mathematics courses.

And in the 2026-27 admitted class of 777 Stuyvesant students, only 21 are Latino and only three are Black.

City Councilman Lincoln Restler responded to these results with a call to end fully exam-based admissions: “We urgently need state legislation to modify the admissions process,” he wrote.

Restler is hardly the first to call for the exam-based schools to go; Bill de Blasio, while serving as New York City mayor in 2018, proposed replacing test-based admissions with admitting the top 7% of each middle school. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who himself attended Bronx Science, had entertained SHSAT abolition during his campaign for state Assembly, but this week he took a much smarter approach, calling for more work to ensure that all middle schoolers are well prepared for the SHSAT.

——-

More.

Will Austin

I am not ready to hand over learning to a robot, or a “guide.” Think of your favorite, most impactful teacher right now. I bet you are smiling. Learning is so important, so human, that it requires and is in some way defined by the people you learned with and from.

If there is both common sense and empirical truth at the center of effective learning it is the presence of an effective instructor. In a way, Alpha School is striving to create one paragon of an educator: the personal tutor. If the children of Egyptian pharaohs and Silicon Valley titans can enjoy this level of support, why not use technology to bring it to more people? Fair, but Alpha School is not offering Socrates. You get a guide and a room with kids full of Chromebooks.

I am rooting for the kids who have enrolled in Alpha School. Families have every right to choose this option for their kids. I hope their kids learn a lot, and Alpha School can learn and share what works in its classrooms.

But I’ll be happy if that school model doesn’t spread. Massachusetts has about 900,000 public school children, and districts spend approximately $20,000 per pupil. At most, Alpha School will enroll 180 students in Greater Boston this school year, charging tuition at least three times that much. Alpha School probably won’t change education because its model is fundamentally unscalable.

———-

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

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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 Stapp:

Texas produces nearly twice as much electricity as any other state in the US.

And the gap is growing…

Jamie Paul

Progressives have contributed no shortage of examples. “Harm” or being “unsafe” now mean little more than “disagreement” or “discomfort.” “Trauma” has become shorthand for any negative feelings whatsoever. “Violence” now encompasses both words and “silence.” Left-wing culture warriors call the online backlashes to their antics “abuse”, while labeling their own public shaming campaigns as “accountability.” Many progressive commentators also routinely characterize criticism as “harassment” or “targeted harassment”, or declare that they are being “targeted” as though they’re Salman Rushdie, in order to curry sympathy and the coveted “I’m so sorry this is happening to you” replies.

…On matters of immigration, the populist right collapsed the views of everyone from the center right to the far left into one undifferentiated mass. Anything short of drastic immigration cutbacks, mass deportations, and walling the country behind electrified ramparts defended by orbital rail guns is now “open borders.” But for all that the right bloviates about “law and order”, it’s very much a “rules for thee but not for me” affair. Indeed, any attempt to hold right-wing politicians to account for actual crimes committed is dubbed “lawfare”, which until recently meant a deliberate misuse of the legal system for partisan political aims.

Philip Greenspun:

Large Language Models (“AI”) are transforming our world. How is Carnegie-Mellon’s linguistics department preparing students to contribute to the Age of AI? Professor Uju Anya has been in the news lately. Example:

On Sept. 8, [2022, as Queen Elizabeth II was on her deathbed] Anya tweeted from her personal account, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”

(Note that use of the phrase “chief monarch” shows an inability to use the English language. There are no non-chief monarchs. Wokipedia: “The word monarch comes from the ancient Greek words monos (meaning “alone”) and arkhein (meaning “to rule”).” Also, is it fair to characterize the UK in 2022 as an “empire”? “Small Islamic island nation,” perhaps? If we are looking back to the 19th century and want to paint the former empire in a better light we could say “Ender of the Arab and African slave trades that began circa 700 AD (Arab) and BCE (African).”)

As with What does Syracuse University teach for $100,000 per year?, nobody asks what students at CMU, each of whom theoretically pays $93,614 per year for the privilege, are learning from Prof. Uju Anya. (Let’s also not forget the taxpayers, who contribute in the form of subsidized student loans (sometimes entirely forgiven!), tuition grants, research grants, tax exemptions for the university’s endowment, and tax deductions given to donors (that increase the burden on other taxpayers).) She’s the author of Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil.

What if Anthropic isn’t hiring anyone for their Speaking Blackness in Brazil group? Prof. Anya teaches “Hip Hop and Funk Discourses of Black Womanhood in Brazil and the U.S.” (all course materials hidden behind a paywall to exclude those who don’t pay $93,614 per year to CMU). That would prepare a CMU graduate to work in the Black Womanhood in Brazil department at OpenAI.

More work by this professor whom the CMU administrators were wise enough to agree to pay every week until she dies (“tenure”; the lifetime paycheck drawn from the students paying $93,614 per year and from the taxpayers (“the chumps”)):

Hollis Robbins:

There are many approaches to “AI readiness” in higher ed. Mine, a 2000-level English course, begins with the second L in large language models, language. Accordingly, and with an eye to state legislators scrutinizing syllabi for racy texts, we begin with Aristotle.

Most AI 101 college courses begin with the technology. Stanford’s CS324 (“a new course on understanding and developing large language models”) opens by defining a language model as a probability distribution over sequences of tokens, which are words or pieces of words. “The mouse ate the cheese” is more probable than “the cheese ate the mouse,” and both are far more probable than “mouse the the cheese ate.” Students learn about entropy and Claude Shannon’s 1951 theory.1

Ed-tech vendors instruct teachers to tell students that a chatbot is a sophisticated autocomplete that does not think, feel, or know. Writing Program courses either assign a book with a unicorn, rainbow, and robot on the cover or long lists of readings that hurt my head. All of these courses assume that students understand how language works and therefore all they need is to have their hand held while they learn a technology. (Arguments abound whether it is “like a calculator” etc.) Anyone watching the news sees that the technology is changing every few months, with lower hallucination rates and higher rogue agent rates. I wanted to teach durable skills about what an LLM is.

What does a young person born around 2006 know about language as a corpus? A lot less than people born before the internet. Many college students learned to read by a now discredited method called three-cueing, told to figure out unfamiliar words by looking at a picture and the first letter, guessing what made sense. Some have read many whole books but the news says they are reading less. According to a 2024–25 survey, high school English teachers have been assigning an average of 2.81 books a year, down from four in 2008–09, and on the 2024 national assessment, twelfth-grade reading scores were the lowest in the test’s history.2

Daisy Christodoulou:

Every three years, the OECD publishes the results of its PISA assessments – a worldwide study of how well 15-year-olds do in reading, maths and science. Last week, the results of PISA 2025 were published and were among the most dramatic on record. The average test scores across dozens of countries have fallen precipitously since the last assessment in 2022 – and those scores were themselves down on the 2018 round.

What is going on? Two global trends are likely to be part of the explanation. First, Covid and the pandemic-era school closures may well have had a bigger, and longer-term, impact than we thought. Second, the rising use of technology and social media may be sapping students’ capacity to concentrate.

But England has avoided the downward trend: it is in the global top ten for reading, maths and science, and the second highest-performing country outside of East Asia. 

Comparing England with the devolved nations is instructive. In 2012, England and Scotland scored around the same, but by 2025, Scottish students had fallen about a year behind in maths and science, and a smaller amount in reading. The scores of students in Northern Ireland, with its selective grammar school system, are around the same as in Scotland, while the scores of students in Wales are even lower.

———

PISA 2025 Results (Volume I) “Future-Ready Students”

Smirkley:

Teacher unions are good if you want your state to spend more and have fewer literacy programs.

Union strength correlates with school spending. r = 0.68, or 0.78 weighted by pop.

States that spend more adopt fewer literacy programs. r = -0.50, or -0.70 weighted by pop.

Scott Sumner:

 I travel around America, most regions seem more class conscious than Wisconsin, at least compared to Madison, Wisconsin back in the 1960s. Like almost everyone there, I went to public schools. I never even knew whether the other students came from a family of doctors, lawyers or janitors. When I got to Boston, I was surprised by the fact that you could tell a lot about a person’s class by their accent. I was shocked to find that some towns reserved their beaches for residents only. Or that there were gated communities. (Today, I live in a gated community and I still hate the idea.) 

I taught a semester in London in 1986 and then a semester in Australia in 1991. In a standard political sense, Britain seems more left wing than Australia. The British government certainly spends more on social programs. But Australia seems to have a more egalitarian culture. I’d make a similar comparison between Wisconsin and Massachusetts. 

Because of the egalitarianism I imbibed growing up, I am very averse to any form of tribalism. I dislike right wingers that demonize various races and gender preferences, but I also dislike left wingers that demonize the rich or straight white males. Indeed I’d favor the French approach of not even having the government collect data on ethnicity, and I’d copy the Swedes by having the government treat everyone as a single person for taxation purposes. I’m a radical individualist egalitarian utilitarian. America’s president is a public servant—I view him no differently from a butler or chauffeur. He works for me.

David Broughton

On Jan. 16, 1972, a Gallup headline proclaimed, “Football Overtakes Baseball as America’s Top Spectator Sport,” as the research company’s survey found 38% of Americans identifying football as their favorite sport to watch while 19% named baseball. That was nearly a reversal of what Gallup had found in the previous time it asked that question, 12 years earlier. At that time, 34% named baseball and 21% football. 

Similarly, in a survey conducted last month, football remains Americans’ favorite sport to watch, by a wide margin, although the 31% who name it as their favorite is the lowest in a generation. 

Although football has topped the list the past 54 years across 23 separate measurements, younger adults’ lesser affinity for the sport helps explain why fewer Americans overall are choosing it as their favorite sport, according to the report. Just 20% of adults aged 18 to 34 identify football as their preferred sport to watch, compared with 30% of those aged 35 to 54 and 38% of those aged 55 and older.

Basketball remains America’s second-most favorite (11%), although its numbers have dropped since its high of 17% in a 1997 poll, when Michael Jordan’s Bulls were the sport’s dominant team.

Meanwhile, 9% of Americans identify soccer as their favorite sport, the highest Gallup has measured by two percentage points. Soccer now is nearly on par with basketball and baseball (10%).

Dalvin Brown:

You suspect your elderly parents are being targeted by financial scammers. Protecting them could require a master course in behavioral science.

There is a growing realization that combating scams means understanding the psychology behind why people fall for them. JPMorgan Chase, for example, hired a behavioral scientist in 2024 to help employees talk to customers who might be under a scammer’s influence. Bank of America has specialists trained to spot financial exploitation so they can work with at-risk clients.

These criminals have gotten highly sophisticated. Many operate out of massive compounds overseas, cultivating deep emotional or romantic attachments with their victims online. Their playbooks often include getting their victims to distrust the people most likely to intervene.

Sisters Heather and Melissa Brown, 45 and 37, respectively, couldn’t convince their 73-year-old mother that a man she met online was a scammer. They traced the photographs he used to another man’s social-media account and then presented their evidence to their mother.

Erin Gretzinger:

Now, he is working closely with south side families once again as the first associate director of family, youth and community engagement, a new joint position between Centro Hispano and the Madison school district.

In Ambriz’s view, his job is to be a “bridge” in communication. Ambriz said he is well positioned to share information between Centro, the district and families on questions about after-school programming, enrollment, immigration and other issues.

“I feel it is very important because I feel like sometimes that there’s a little bit of disconnect, a little miscommunication, or just maybe too much information being thrown at our families,” he said, adding he is focused on “letting them know that their voice matters with what’s happening in schools — both at the schools that their kids attend, but also district-wide.”

Ambriz’s new role encapsulates the two entities’ recent efforts to grow their partnership. Under a three-year agreement approved by the Madison School Board last fall, the district and the nonprofit pledged to build a “new model for partnership” aiming to strengthen Latinx students’ sense of belonging, cultural identity and academic growth in Madison schools.

———

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

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Emma Burleigh:

Goldman Sachs just brought together around 50 Gen Zers from ultra-rich families for a deep-dive on investing, wealth management, and leadership. 

Over the course of the two-week wealth bootcamp in July, the multimillionaire 18- to 23-year-olds attended workshops led by senior Goldman Sachs leaders and industry experts in coaching and luxury. 

One morning, the Gen Zers spent nearly an hour learning how to digest Wall Street Journalarticles, strengthening their confidence in reading market news and pinpointing what to take away. And in the afternoons, they’d go through a whole host of crash courses; learning the role of an equity trader from one of Goldman’s own managing directors; touring trading floors, where they got a firsthand look at deals and trades; and studying hedge fund basics and ways to create diverse portfolios. 

It was all part of Goldman’s third annual NextGS Investment Intensive Program in New York City. And learning how to understand markets and communicate effectively will come in handy as they step into generational fortunes; much of the Gen Z cohort are kids of the members of Goldman’s private wealth management division, which boasts an average account size of over $90 million, and services clients with fortunes ranging from $10 million to more than $1 billion in assets. 

“A fundamental reason we created this program was to allow the young adult children of our families the opportunity to become more confident,” Brittany Boals Moeller, region head of Goldman Sachs’ San Francisco PWM division, tells Fortune. “Many of the participants are not finance majors. They have vastly different academic backgrounds and career ambitions.”

David Sacks:

Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.

Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.

So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.

If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

———

Mehdi:

however I still think Dario & Anthropic pushing for AI safety regulations rn is mostly about money because their upcoming S1 filings are going to show crazy burn rates on compute so calling for safety audits gives them a perfect excuse to freeze spending without looking weak to investors

I see this whole effective altruism safety movement as a new kind of gatekeeping where a small group claims they know what is best for everyone wanting state regulators to lock down model weights & restrict access while calling it public good

I believe open models & sovereign compute will win anyway because intelligence naturally leaks and decentralizes so trying to build a corporate cartel around code just will not work in the long run

whatt makes this even more revealing is the arrogant geopolitical protectionism hidden beneath the ethical theater…

———

The Post Labor Day AI Panic Psyop Has Been Launched! Antthropic, Open AI & Goverment are the prime beneficiaries

———-

I do not support pacing frontier models. If I am going to die at the hands of killer AI, I want it to be American, not Chinese. Buy American, Die American.

————

Marc Andreessen:

Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance. They should simply be allowed to compete. If and as startups don’t succeed, their presence in the market will also continuously motivate big companies to be their best – our economies and societies win either way.

Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever. Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have.

To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities. This shouldn’t be limited to AI-enabled risks but also more general problems such as malnutrition, disease, and climate. AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such.

———-

This is no doubt the asymmetric information Bessent has been alluding to for weeks. There’s going to be a helluva lot of liquidity freed by this move. It’s all going to go flooding into USTs. Happy D day bond guys.

———

Translation: our gross margins are getting competed down to 0 by open source models and our capex burn rate is too high.

Let’s maintain our margins with regulatory capture, ban open source models, and slow down the capex arms race. All with a virtue signaling cherry on top.

———-

So what is really on offer is a quid pro quo. We reduce buildout and the recursive element of our technology (focus more on advances that we control and architecture), and maybe give you a few more chips, and you clamp down on open weight models and bring more of your research in house too.

So perhaps the better way to read it is that this is an outreach to China to get the open weights under control.

Daniel Susskind:

The Pisa results sound the alarm on the disastrous impact of tech on our basic skills

And here, we must draw a red line: if we do not confront this decline in literacy and numeracy, it will be a disaster. It is bad in itself. But in preparing the next generation for the age of AI, the loss of these basic skills is catastrophic.

To begin with, literacy and numeracy are not only “basic” in the sense that they are simple, but also because they are the building blocks for all more advanced capabilities — creativity, judgment, reasoning, problem-solving, whatever they might be.

It is impossible to predict the future of work — what jobs will exist, which advanced skills will be in demand. But whatever the latter turn out to be, they will build upon these basics. If the next generation is to flourish, they must have these foundations in place.

And there is another reason to worry about falling literacy and numeracy: AI capabilities are uneven and likely to remain that way. Yes, these systems are magnificent at certain tasks. But at others they are either confidently wrong or simply make things up. If humans are to tell the difference, we must keep our understanding of the fundamentals razor-sharp. It is not enough to use AI — we have to use it critically.

…..
And there is a sad irony in this Scottish and Welsh disaster: by explicitly trying to prepare young people for the future, they have become distracted by woolly ideas like “21st century learning” and “future-oriented approaches”, letting the very things required for the coming generations to flourish in the age of AI — numeracy and literacy — fall into disrepair.

Dave Winer summary:

Play with this teachers. It can be done, and done well. But you have to bring your content expertise to the problem. If you don’t have content expertise, you’re right to be fearful. So develop it, as fast as you can.

Meanwhile, periodic formative and comprehensive summative assessments should happen in class, on paper, with no phones or laptops, so the teacher knows she’s seeing what the kids know, not what they can produce with AI.

AI at home under a parent’s supervision is a win for American education, if the American K-12 establishment can dump its sclerotic, fear-driven, adult-employee-centric habits.

Trithemius:

Scribes, therefore, give strength to words, memory to things, vigor to times. If you remove them from the Church, faith wavers, charity grows cold, hope falls, justice perishes, law is confounded, the Gospel passes into oblivion. In short, if writing fails, the people will be scattered, devotion will be extinguished, and the peace of catholic unity, thrown into confusion, will be disturbed. But without scribes, writing cannot long remain safe, since it is broken by accident and corrupted by age. For printing is a thing of paper and in a short time is wholly consumed. But the scribe, entrusting letters to parchment, extends both himself and the things he writes into a far distant time.

Thus he enriches the Church, preserves the faith, destroys heresies, repels vices, instructs morals, and gives increase to virtues. The devoted scribe, such as we intend to describe, praises God, gladdens the angels, strengthens just people, corrects sinners, commends the humble, preserves the good, battles down the proud, and condemns the obstinate. The scribe marked by piety is God’s herald, because he announces God’s will both to those present and to those to come: promising eternal life to the good, pardon to the penitent, punishment to the negligent, and damnation to those who despise it.

What is more salutary than this art, what more commendable in piety? God loves it; angels honor it; all the citizens of heaven venerate it. For this is the art that fashions weapons for the faithful against heretics, that casts down the proud, strips demons by its strength, and sets a rule of living for Christians. This is the art that teaches the ignorant, strengthens the faint-hearted, cherishes the devout, and embraces the peaceable with love. What could I say that would be worthy in praise of the scribe? Whatever I shall say is below his praises, because the narrow spirit within me will be constrained before material worthy of so great an honor is lacking.

I confess that there happens to me what very often happens to unskilled orators: terrified by the majesty of the matters about which they have begun to speak, they can neither say what they feel nor, because of shame, presume to be silent. And so it happens that, while they fear to transgress the order and rules of speaking, they fall away from the useful purpose set before them. For just as the spirit of prophecy sometimes, for a time and for a useful reason, leaves even the prophets, so too customary eloquence is not always present to orators. How much more easily, then, is trembling struck into me, who am neither a rhetorician nor fit to adorn so broad a subject with speech. My tongue clings to my now dry palate; breath presses upon my dry innards; my pen trembles, looking again to Jesus; in my breast alone the desire and love of the scribe remain strong. Therefore, when I fail, let no one think that the subject matter was lacking, but that words were lacking to the speaker. Yet I shall do what I can, with Christ’s help, since charity alone is the cause of our labor, and it is rightly proclaimed able to do all things.

——-

More.

Neetu Arnold:

The University of Michigan plans to exclude first-semester letter grades from students’ transcripts to “curb the mental health crisis.” What would seem like a mundane university-level grading change has become a cultural touchpoint. Early-morning talk shows, national to local outlets—everyone seems to have a reaction.

The grading policy is expected to go into effect in fall 2027 in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the largest school at the university. Freshmen will still know what grades they received internally, but those grades won’t count toward their overall GPA. Everyone will be required to receive pass/no credit because “covering an individual’s grades will inadvertently become equated with them not doing well in a class.”

Although covered grading appeals to a very real concern about the difficult transition year, it is a risky policy with an unremarkable track record. Although covered grading appeals to a very real concern about the difficult transition year, it is a risky policy with an unremarkable track record. 

History of Covered Grading

Covered, or shadow, grading is when colleges share freshmen’s letter grades with students internally but exclude them from transcripts. The rationale for this kind of policy has historically been to ease the stress that high-achieving students place on themselves when attending unusually rigorous schools.

Michigan would join a small club of universities that have this unusual policy. Other prominent universities include MIT, Caltech, and Wellesley. Schools that adopted these policies mostly did so in the 1960s and 1970s, with Caltech and MIT as early adopters. Caltech facultyhoped that students would learn to “substitute more mature and substantial motives for work than the threat of a low GPA or the status of a high one.”

Does Covered Grading Work?

Covered grading may reduce stress and encourage students to try courses they otherwise would have avoided. Michigan has indicated that it would evaluateits initiative largely on these measures. But the question shouldn’t just be whether covered grading is liked by students or whether it reduces stress. A policy can achieve its immediate aims while creating more serious problems elsewhere.

——-

More.

Bill Glahn

Thus sayeth Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security. From the U.K. Daily Mail,

Trump immigration boss says Ilhan Omar DID marry her brother… and an official investigation could see her deported.

Well, we’ll see about that. As long-time readers of Power Line, you were among the first to know about the brother-marriage of the now-Congresswoman from Minneapolis.

Why it occurred all of those years ago has long been a mystery to everyone except the principals.

——-

Scott Johnson:

The Star Tribune story focuses on the years 2024 and 2025. However, the scale of the Feeding Our Future fraud at the heart of the story became evident no later than November 2020, when Feeding Our Future sued the Department of Human Services for failing to approve new sites — new fraudulent sites. The state had a golden opportunity to confront Feeding Our Future and shut the whole thing down at that time. Yet it folded.

Sabine Martin:

The Universities of Wisconsin announced an estimated about 1% decrease in enrollment across the 13 universities this fall, according to preliminary student counts.

Out of the 13 universities, six are projected to grow and seven to decline. UW-Eau Claire has the largest percentage decline of 5.2%, a drop of 498 students.

UW-Green Bay has the largest projected percentage increase, at 3.5%, and a numerical increase of 400 students.

Official enrollment will be announced later in the fall.

Here’s the enrollment gains and losses, by the numbers:

Jeremy Wayne Tate:

Were the California professors clamoring to reinstate the SAT aware of these changes? With reading passages as short as 25 words, the SAT has abandoned even trying to test whether a student is able to focus their attention for more than a few minutes.

When the two main college entrance exams become shells of what they once were, it undermines all of higher education. I believe this is why many of the most serious academic institutions in the country now either accept or favor the CLT. At West Point, the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy, we aren’t just an option; we have been declared the “gold standard” by the Secretary of War. This movement is already reshaping the educational track students aspiring to attend our top service academies are taking in high school. Add to this our early-adopter institutions, such as Hillsdale, the University of Dallas, and Thomas Aquinas College, for whom the CLT has become the main college entrance exam.

Chester Finn, Jr.:

The federal Head Start program has needed a makeover since it launched in 1965, but the Trump administration’s approach doesn’t go far enough. Reports on the White House’s plan indicate it would scrap most of Head Start’s so-called quality standards and let the states decide—an idea with merit. But the federal government should aim for a deregulated Head Start that prepares needy 3- to 5-year-olds to succeed in kindergarten and beyond.

America’s education woes begin with 5-year-olds who aren’t ready for kindergarten. Schools should do more to solve this problem—hooray for the “science of reading” movement that’s sweeping the land—but the results would be much greater if more children arrived with a proper head start. That’s unlikely under the Trump plan.

From the beginning, Head Start turned a blind eye to school preparation. It set out to be a “child development” program. Its Great Society architects wanted “to help break the cycle of poverty, providing preschool children of low-income families with a comprehensive program to meet their emotional, social, health, nutritional and psychological needs.” All to the good, but you find nothing about getting kids ready to learn the 3 Rs.

Experts, the center directors who profit from operating the program and hundreds of thousands of staffers in those centers—many without college degrees themselves—have fought long and hard against turning Head Start into an education program. When the Education Department was created in 1979, the program remained in Health and Human Services.

Tyler Cowen:

The Manhattan Project scientists were remarkably good technological and arms-race forecasters. They correctly rejected the idea that America’s nuclear monopoly could be maintained; the Soviet bomb arrived in 1949. They anticipated thermonuclear weapons, huge arsenals and the extreme vulnerability of cities.

Where many of them went wrong was in moving from “a nuclear war would be catastrophic” to “therefore a catastrophic nuclear war is fairly likely.” They tended to underweight the endogenous response of political and military institutions to the catastrophe—the emergence of second-strike forces, elaborate command systems, crisis management, and above all mutually assured retaliation.

There is even some contemporary evidence for an insider/ordinary-public gap. In August 1945, 69% of Americans told Gallup that development of the atomic bomb was a “good thing,” versus only 17% saying it was bad. The scientists campaigning for international control plainly regarded the public as far too complacent.

Matt Galloway:

There have been alarm bells ringing for some time about dropping math scores in this country 

In her documentary, “Are your kids learning math the right way?”, CBC’s Julia Pagel visits a school in Gimli, Manitoba, where new teaching strategies yield impressive test results—while sparking a deeper debate over the best way to teach math.

——-

Why are students getting worse at math?

——-

This 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.

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

Simone Scavo:

The mechanism is the same one I see every time a field falls in love with a metric.

A famous problem—let’s take Riemann or Navier-Stokes as an example, a Millennium Prize—didn’t matter for the answer. It mattered as a measuring tool: if someone solved it, that was the sign that new methods had been born. Then the slow process would start: seminars, discussions, simplifications, a textbook readable by a third-year student. After thirty years, that method would end up inside a compression algorithm or a cryptographic protocol.

The problem was the thermometer, not the fever.

When an AI company uses that thermometer as a product benchmark, exactly what the mathematicians describe happens: the mass production of “true/false” statements at an increasing pace can destroy fertile ground instead of giving it life. You optimize the proxy and lose the thing the proxy was measuring.

———

Mark Bao:

A lot of people are missing Terence Tao’s point and thinking “mathematicians are upset that AI is better than them.” That’s not what he’s saying, and some people are forgetting that Tao is one of the most AI-pilled mathematicians out there.

His point is that when people work on discovering something, along the way they invent new concepts. Those concepts later become useful far beyond the original goal, and enables further inventions. Finding a solution does matter, but the intermediate idea is often what makes the field richer, because other people can share it and build the next thing from it.

In tech, we can use the analogy of collaborative software. We started with algorithms for merging changes in a Word document, and evolved that to concepts about versions, diffs, and merges, and later to real-time collaboration tools like Git, Google Docs, and Figma. Humans built upon these concepts and developed more powerful solution

———

This 2009 (!) University of Wisconsin-Madison Placement Office study of “reform vs traditional math” outcomes came to mind when reading Corrinne Hess’s 7 July 2026 article: “Fewer than half of Wisconsin students are proficient at math“.

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

—-

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.

John Burn-Murdoch:

There was one problem: even as these visits were taking place, Finnish scores were in a sustained slide. Today, its results are little better than the average country, and many argue its exceptional performance — which peaked around 2000 — owed more to the conventional comprehensive approach it had used in previous decades.

Recent results in the UK support this theory. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland went down similar routes to Finland during the 2010s, shifting away from established curricula and towards more broadly defined learning outcomes, scrapping school league tables and some standardised tests. By contrast, England doubled down on the established curriculum with strict guidance on the content schools must cover in core subjects, alongside the use of league tables with performance measures that made the rankings harder to game. Fifteen years on, England’s results have held up, propelling it into the top ten internationally, while in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland they have plummeted.

It is a similar story in the US, where children in poorer southern states like Mississippi have made huge gains, overtaking their counterparts in wealthy states like California and moving from well below the national average to above it. Improvements have been especially pronounced among the lowest-scoring children. There, as in the UK, the most common explanations are Mississippi’s adoption of evidence-based classroom methods including teaching phonics at an early age, and its emphasis on accountability, from school rankings to requiring that children be capable readers before they progress. 

———

Kaiser Bauch:

A lot of people asked for a comparison of elite pupils across different countries. Cross-comparing specific school types like gymnasiums isn’t really possible, since these vary a lot from country to country, so the most straightforward way to do it is to simply compare the top decile of students in each country (combined science, reading & math).

To make it a bit more interesting, I added how each country’s ranking changes compared to the overall ranking of all students. Here you can see that Czech elite students aren’t particularly elite by comparison — our ranking actually gets slightly worse when you isolate the top decile.

Notes on 2025 PISA

The Economist

VERY THREE years the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, releases the results of international school tests sat by 15-year-olds all across the world. There were reasons to hope that the latest data, published on September 8th, would bring positive news. Marks in mathematics, reading and science had collapsed in the previous round of testing, which was carried out just after the pandemic. Policymakers dared hope that, with the calamity well in the past, grades might start to rebound.

PISA 2025 Results (Volume I) “Future-Ready Students”

OECD:

————-

Marilyn Muller:

Rahm Emanuel (@RahmEmanuel) is suddenly preaching phonics, science of reading, and teacher training. How convenient.

He is the same mayor who ran Chicago Public Schools for eight years and never made evidence-based reading, writing, and math instruction the non-negotiable core of how classroom teachers were prepared or supported.

He closed 50 schools—the largest mass closing in U.S. history—overwhelmingly in Black neighborhoods, promising better academics. University of Chicago research found the closings did not deliver meaningful academic gains for the kids who were moved. Graduation rates rose. Proficiency did not keep pace. A later look at students who started elementary school on his watch showed large shares still not reading or doing math at grade level.

————

James Furey:

I’m fairly certain the average American teacher doesn’t even know what good teaching looks like.

————

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

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Junjie Guo and Ananth Seshadri

Executive Summary

Wisconsin’s college-educated residents do not leave at unusually high rates. The deeper weakness is on the other side of the ledger: relatively few educated newcomers arrive, especially from far away and among people born in other states. At the median state’s arrival rate, Wisconsin would receive about 7,600 more college-educated arrivals a year. Most of that gap reflects Wisconsin’s generally low rate of interstate circulation. Given its low departure rate, the national relationship predicts only about 1,500 more arrivals a year than Wisconsin actually receives.

The widely cited recent “brain drain” ranking measures something different. Among adults aged 31 to 40, 59.8 percent of Wisconsin-born people living elsewhere hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 45.2 percent of people born in other states who live here, a 14.6-point gap that ranks second among the 50 states. Among the same birthplace-defined groups, Wisconsin has more college-educated natives living in other states than college-educated adults born in other states living here, as do most states. Counting those people puts Wisconsin 31st of 50. The second-place ranking is a comparison of educational composition, not a ranking of current net migration.

Recent migration flows are much less dramatic. From 2021 to 2024, Wisconsin’s net migration rate for college-educated adults aged 25 to 44 was essentially zero, ranking 25th among the 50 states. Its arrival rate was the 10th lowest in the country; its departure rate was the fifth lowest. Wisconsin did lose college graduates on net through much of the 2010s, roughly 3,700 to 4,200 a year at mid-decade, but recent flows are approximately balanced.

By Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli

After years of mounting concern about students and screens, the techlash came to a head in June when the Los Angeles Unified School District made headlines for approving a new screen-time policy for students.

The policy is blunt by design. It limits students’ school-assigned screen time on district-issued devices (such as laptops and tablets),[1] counting both in-school use and homework. Students in pre-K through first grade cannot use school devices for instruction at all, while older elementary students are limited to 60 minutes per day. Middle and high schools have subject-specific limits; for example, high schoolers may spend no more than 90 minutes per subject per week on screens, up to a weekly maximum of 600 minutes.

Opinions were mixed on whether LAUSD got it right. Some welcomed the limits, while others thought tech deserved a more nuanced accounting of its virtues.

Yet whatever one thinks of America’s second-largest school district’s attempt to rein in the downsides of technology, one thing is clear: LAUSD tapped into the national zeitgeist. Weary of children transfixed by devices, isolated from peers and adults alike, district leaders responded to parental pressure and essentially said, “Enough is enough! There has to be a better way.”

Sean deLone

The paradigm of nonfiction being the more stable category is no longer the case. Part of this is platform unpredictability— it is less and less certain which platforms will translate directly to book sales. Media also isn’t as concentrated; you can’t depend on coverage on a few national news programs to push out copies but rather a parasocial connection—even with a relatively smaller reach—between author and reader is likely to translate to stronger sales. Bunnie Xo has a large social media following for instance (2 million on Instagram) but isn’t an established household name such that you’d think her book would be the third bestselling nonfiction hardcover this year. 

However, the nonfiction decline is far less about the changing nature of “platform” and the fractured media landscape, and more about a precipitous falloff in demand. No amount of platform is going to change that interest across the board in nonfiction from celebrities down to science has been slowly disappearing. Even if nonfiction is stable and more predictable than fiction in the abstract, it’s by far worth taking the risk on an unknown novelist if the return is potentially 4x as much. Let’s bring the nonfiction collapse into current day context. Two weeks ago, the entire hardcover nonfiction bestseller list sold 42,000 copies, whereas just the top two bestselling fiction hardcovers the same week—The Calamity Club in its 15^th week on-sale and Yesteryear in its 19^th week on-sale—sold 52,000 copies. It’s not inconceivable that on the right week, one fiction hardcover with first week sales could outsell the entirety of the hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.

Christian Moore-Anderson:

Education is caught in a debate over autonomy and cohesion. On one side, teachers are demanding professional autonomy: the right to discretion over their lessons. Others are demanding “consistency” through rigid structures and scripts. Neither is fully right.

Professional autonomy is vital, but too much can result in the “siloed teacher”. The potential to create something greater through cohesive teaching and curricula is lost. But to understand the issue with “teaching consistency,” we must move past the binary of autonomy versus control. It’s more fruitful to look at a teacher’s autonomy versus collectively gained capacity.

A teacher’s autonomy versus collectively gained capacity

A graph will help, and through its analysis, I’ll show how some “teaching consistency” arguments don’t add up.

On the y-axis, you’ll find the teacher’s retained autonomy: the capacity to decide how to coordinate with their students. Specifically, it’s the discretion that has been retained (the variety of options still decidable by them) while working within a school (a collective). These may be options for how to teach:

• Can you slow the lesson down and not complete the summary activity?
• Can you decide to use your own resources?
• Can you dedicate more lessons to a topic?
• Can you choose a different text or demonstration, or write a different assessment?

On the x-axis, you’ll find the extra capacity that teachers gain when coordinating with other teachers or systems. When, for example, we enter a department and decide on a curriculum, we suddenly gain extra capacity to act through the collective designing and sharing of resources.

Wall Street Journal:

The Department of Homeland Security says this “fee” on H-1B visa applications will fund administration of immigration services. The H-1B program lets businesses hire foreign workers with specialized skills if they can’t find Americans for a position. The goal of this tax isn’t to raise revenue as much as to make it much more expensive to hire foreign workers.

H-1B visas by law are capped at 85,000 a year. Because applications usually exceed the cap, visas are allocated by lottery. While the program has sometimes been abused, only 4,573 H-1B petitions were approved last year for major Indian-based consulting and IT companies, some of which have been accused of abuses.

Still, restrictionists say foreign workers are taking jobs from Americans. “If an American corporation needs workers, it should hire and train Americans,” Vice President JD Vance wrote on social media, linking to a news story about the proposed H-1B tax. That’s a classic straw man argument.

Businesses invest heavily in training U.S. workers, but colleges are educating too few graduates with particular skill sets that employers need—e.g., cyber-security and robotics. According to the National Foundation for American Policy, foreigners account for roughly 75% to 80% of full-time graduate students in AI-related fields.

WBAY news staff:

A new report shows Wisconsin property tax levies saw their biggest jump in nearly 20 years.

According to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, levies are up 5.8% on the latest bills. The state’s total property value has now topped $1 trillion.

Democratic candidate David Crowley said, “I’ve delivered for working Wisconsin families that includes lowering property taxes and making housing and childcare more affordable and accessible. I will consider the long-term investments we can make and work with the legislature to bring costs down for all Wisconsinites.”

Republican candidate Tom Tiffany said, “Lowering property taxes will be one of my top priorities as governor. On day one, I will call a special session to end the 400-year property tax hike and give Wisconsin homeowners certainty that their property taxes won’t keep climbing year after year.”

———

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Quinton Klabon

Talk to your typical Wisconsinite and they will tell you Milwaukee is the past, Madison is the future. Milwaukee is shrinking, unsafe and broke, they will argue, while Madison is flush with people, turning out votes, and have you seen all of the new construction?

I do not buy it. To keep Wisconsin strong, we need our champion cities to be at their very best. Sadly, Madison is failing to provide the quality of services its citizens deserve.

So I will say in the open what people have been whispering: Madison Metropolitan School District is as troubled as Milwaukee Public Schools is.

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

So, what is the product?

Madison’s test scores are near the state’s bottom. Controlling for poverty (so you can see how well a district teaches, not the backgrounds of its students), Madison ranks 13th of Wisconsin’s 15 biggest districts on the Forward Exam and 12th on the ACT. That is right next to Milwaukee and far below leaders like Sheboygan and Janesville. Specifically, Madison has a tragically high number of students failing mathematics. The percentage of students scoring “developing,” the lowest tier, on the Forward math section is 14 points higher than expected for its student body. The percentage scoring “developing” on ACT’s math portion, a 15 or below, is 12 points higher. Accounting for poverty’s relationship with test performance, Madison’s district vastly underperforms the level predicted by its economic disadvantage.

Hispanic and Black students are doing no better in Madison’s district than they are in Milwaukee’s. The average ACT score for Madison’s Black students is 14.6. Milwaukee’s is 14.4. The average ACT score for Madison’s Hispanic students is 15.9. Milwaukee’s is 16.0. You cannot open the news in Milwaukee without catching another national report rightly reproaching Milwaukee for the nation’s lowest scores and worst gaps. When will Madison receive the same scrutiny?

Madison is getting critical questions wrong, possibly wrecking recovery. Take its mathematics curriculum. The district is getting away from traditional instruction: “I do, we do, you do.” That is how the nation’s best schools teach, how some of the nation’s best coaches coach, and how you teach your child to cook. “I will show you how to crack an egg. Now, we will crack an egg together. Okay, you show me how to crack an egg.” Instead, as Assistant Superintendent Cindy Green explained to Madison’s school board, “We do it together … through dialogue, through discourse, through application. Then, it’s you all go … practice that to yourself. And then, it’s I do and I show you.” That is “productive struggle,” a quick way to frustrate students, squander class time, and develop bad habits. Madison is giving a classroom of first graders cartons of eggs and hoping they do not make a mess.

———

More:

MADISON VERSUS SHEBOYGAN
low income: 43% / 63%
special needs: 17% / 19%
English 2nd language: 21% / 17%
funding: $22,298 / $16,362

math proficiency: 43% / 48%
reading proficiency: 47% / 45%
math failure: 31% / 22%
reading failure: 29% / 22%

But DPI says Madison is better. Nope!

———

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Jesh Ramesh:

As an engineer, I ran maintenance for a Fortune 500 pulp and paper company. I was based at a plant in Tennessee and covered nine other facilities across the Southeast and Florida. For anyone unfamiliar with heavy industry, these plants are filled with massive, capital-intensive equipment: three-story machines stretching the length of a football field, motors running constantly, and forklifts moving across the floor to keep the plant fed with raw material. It is an environment built to run continuously. A single hour of unplanned downtime can destroy hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of dollars in lost production, depending on the line.

When critical systems failed, and the laws of entropy ensure they always fail, it was never a software engineer or a sleek, cloud-connected dashboard that saved the day. The facility relied entirely on technicians like “Craig,” a millwright with thirty years of accumulated tribal knowledge: the hyper-specific, undocumented expertise and nuanced understanding of legacy equipment that resides in the minds of veteran workers rather than in manuals or databases.

Craig was the kind of technician who could diagnose a failing bearing simply by the pitch of its squeal or the specific frequency of a vibration traveling through a steel walkway. He knew which parts had been replaced, which modifications had never made it into the drawings, and which repair in the manual no longer applied to the machine in front of him. Manuals capture only so much, and they capture it in two dimensions. A maintenance technician works in three, using sight, sound, touch, and years of trial and error. Maintenance is also time-sensitive. Craig could often diagnose a problem faster than a newer technician could locate the relevant drawing. The documentation existed, but during a breakdown it was frequently incomplete, outdated, or too slow to use. That way of working has a consequence. Because the knowledge lived in Craig’s head, recording it was never the priority. The plant did not feel an urgent need to document why a certain oil had been discontinued, when a control program had last been changed, or why a replacement belt differed from the one in the parts list. Craig already knew.

Ground News Summary:

The complaint says the policy denies parental rights and exposes students to addictive content, pornography and violent videos.

LeftCenterRightBias Comparison

• Seven parents sued the 8,500-student Lower Merion School District in federal court last week, challenging the repeal of a policy that allowed families to opt their children out of using internet-connected devices.
• The board repealed the longstanding opt-out policy in June, prompting parents to accuse Superintendent Frank Ranelli and the district of creating an environment that is unhealthy, unsafe and invasive for students.
• Lead plaintiff Yair Lev, a cardiologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, joined the Texas-based EdTech Law Center to bring what experts call an unusual lawsuit challenging school board authority.
• Education Secretary Linda McMahon stated on August 23 that she opposes ‘recreational screen time’ at school, while the Lower Merion School District denies the allegations and will respond through the judicial process.
• New York lawmakers introduced legislation last week to make paper-and-pencil tasks the predominant means of instruction in elementary classrooms, while experts like Stacy Hawthorne of the Consortium for School Networking expect such disputes to continue through school board deliberations.

Chris Arnade:

Again, this wasn’t surprising, or shocking. Neither of these moments would have been notable, except that they came first, and I could list hundreds of others, because the amount of addiction in the aboriginal community is absolutely absurd. Being in any Australian neighborhoods with a significant aboriginal population means seeing the dysfunction from their addiction, or more commonly, ignoring it, because it’s politically impolite to talk about. 

That’s not to say every aboriginal is a drunk — sobriety and moderate drinking do exist — but they are something to be celebrated rather than expected.

There is also a different tenor to the dysfunction — it’s largely confined to alcohol abuse, so gone are the tweakers, leaners, and twitchers — and it’s rarely aggressive to outsiders (although domestic abuse is a substantial problem). Almost everyone involved is polite, keeping to themselves, and even when they do approach asking for money it’s with an apologetic tone, giving it almost an “old school charm.” A “Never mind me, I’m just the lovable town drunk” ethos that populates US sitcoms of the past.

Scott Hamilton

Like the rest of the nation, I spent the next several days glued to the television set, disbelieving even as I watched the footage of the United Airlines 767 hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center, even as the buildings collapsed, even as the Pentagon went up in flames. American Airlines and United Airlines Boeing 767-200ERs were commandeered by terrorists and flown into the 110-story North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, New York City.

Marina Villeneuve:

Nalia Mutz started her freshman year at the University of Lynchburg in 2022 knowing exactly where she wanted to be four years later: right on track toward her dream of becoming a doctor.

When the university eliminated a dozen majors in 2024, the resulting layoffs left fewer professors to teach the science courses she needed to graduate. She began to fear earning her biomedicine degree the way she’d planned could take two extra years. 

“It was just a lot of cuts all around, and then they just didn’t have enough staff,” Mutz, 21, said. 

Higher education has faced fiscal headwinds in recent years as hundreds of institutions grapple with declining enrollment because of demographic trends and growing public skepticism about the value of a college degree. Trump policies targeting international students and cutting federal research funding made the financial situation more dire, as have new caps to graduate student loan borrowing and threats to block undergraduate programs from accepting federal financial aid unless alumni earn more than a typical high school graduate. 

As colleges tighten their belts, millions of students like Mutz feel the consequences. Small, private nonprofit institutions that rely heavily on tuition — like the University of Lynchburg — are likely to be hit hardest.

While just a small fraction of colleges will end up closing, those that survive may resort to cutting programs and staff, a move that could balance the books but leave students adrift. Experts and students themselves say it’s time to pay more attention to the impact of college downsizing.

———-

College Financial Health Tracker

By Lily Altavena:

High school credit recovery has long been a controversial stop on the way to graduation for some of America’s struggling students. Champions of these programs say they help vulnerable students graduate when they otherwise wouldn’t, and some superintendents say they’re an important tool. But while the programs may help more students cross the finish line, skeptics say they also allow students to skate through while accomplishing little academically.

The number of students enrolled in credit recovery courses increased by 13% following the pandemic, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of federal data comparing the 2017-18 and 2023-24 school years, the most recent data available. The 2017-18 data reflects the closest collection taken prior to the 2020 COVID-19 school shutdowns. 

In North Carolina, the number of students enrolled increased by 173%, from 16,882 to 46,133 in the 2023-24 school year. In Maryland, enrollment increased by 75%.

Quinton Klabon:

Here is a 2024 ESTIMATE of the Wisconsin high schools with the most students taking credit recovery to graduate.

Most, but not all, are alternative schools. And were ~20% of virtual high-school students using it for credit recovery?

Kelsey Piper

Alpha School — a franchise of private schools advertising their ability to teach students more than traditional schools in vastly less time — are cropping up all over the country. There’s one in my neighborhood, and there’s another across the bay in San Francisco that charges $75,000 a year. Austin has a bunch of them, including the Texas Sports Academy — whose pitch seems to be that you can get your education out of the way as fast as possible so you can spend more time on athletics — NextGen Academy for gamers, Founders School for entrepreneurs, and Montessorium, which blends the Alpha model with Montessori teachings.

The commonality among all Alpha schools is the company’s “2 Hour Learning” technology, called Timeback. The idea is that every day, each student gets assigned two hours of activities to complete through a variety of edtech apps. These can include passages with reading comprehension questions, math lessons and practice problems, and recording apps to help students practice public speaking.

The work is individualized to the student’s current learning level. They’re supposed to get through their work as quickly as possible to free up the rest of the day for programs and workshops. And the company claims that, as a result, the kids learn much more quickly than kids at normal schools.

One of Alpha’s innovations is that the kids themselves are highly successful marketers for the program — alumni write articles about Alpha’s merits, and I see children constantly in short-form videos, showing off their checklists of skills to master before they move on to the next grade.

Alpha is quite specific about just how much faster its students learn. If you go to the website of Alpha Anywhere, the company’s homeschool/remote learning platform, it will tell you it offers “mastery-based learning tailored to your child, built for 2x faster learning in 2 hours a day, from anywhere.” If you look for their gifted and talented program, that one advertises “3-7x faster learning.”

Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe:

It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. South Africa not only had abundant natural resources at its disposal but also boasted a well-developed industrial economy and the continent’s top university system.

After nearly a half-century of apartheid, however, South African leaders argued that formal equality wasn’t enough. Instead, as the argument went, a transitional period of redress for nonwhites was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform, and “black economic empowerment,” among others. For example, the government bought white-owned farms and distributed them to black South Africans, many of whom lacked the skills and knowledge to run them successfully. As a result, once-profitable farming operations fell into disrepair and underuse, weakeningboth economic productivity and food security.

Finally, a reason to check your email.

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South Africa created a dense system of race-based policies across employment, procurement, land rights, and licensing. The country embedded racialism throughout the political, educational, and economic systems, making identity central to how the government, schools, and businesses hired employees, enrolled students, prioritized benefits, bid on contracts, and assessed the success of initiatives.

Today, the hope that followed the fall of apartheid has all but evaporated. South Africa now struggles—literally—to keep the lights on. Power outages are so common that many middle-class families buy generators. Suburban homes regularly feature tall security gates and electric fences to fend off violent thugs. The number of truck hijackings along the nation’s highways are “high even by global comparisons,” according to one scholar. Those who can afford it pay for private security to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.

Corruption is rampant. South Africa’s race-based procurement model shows “systemic signs of corruption and political interference,” according to the World Bank and the OECD. President Cyril Ramaphosa boasts an estimated net worth in the hundreds of millions as of 2015. Former president Jacob Zuma has faced a litany of corruption, fraud, racketeering, and money-laundering allegations.

Predictably, the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath of apartheid have become permanent. For many of the country’s leaders, the question is no longer whether racial redistribution is permissible; instead, the question is how extreme the racial redistribution will be. Race has been reinforced as a continual site of social conflict, instead of fading into the background of a multiethnic society.

LigonDuncan:

How can that be? Partly because RTS is massively in person and the other school is massively online.

Another illustration, in a chart that Ryan produced last year, one of our sister confessional Reformed seminaries was ranked as larger than RTS based on FTE (that school is not in his top twenty this year). But RTS is significantly larger than that institution! How can that be? Again, because most of the other school’s credit hours were online and most of RTS’s credit hours are in person. Students who are residential take more credit hours than online students, they are more full time, and they graduate faster.

One more illustration, one of Ryan’s charts showed RTS down 20% in FTE since 2007. I’m looking at a chart of our TCH from 2004 to 2025 right now as I write this, and RTS is up in TCH over the same timeframe and significantly up in MDiv credit hours. Ryan’s math isn’t wrong. It’s just that FTE isn’t the only or most reliable measure of size and growth.

Eva Moskowitz:

Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools.

Parents deserve to know how well high schools are preparing their students for college-level work. That’s why U.S. News & World Report is a great tool. For years, it has publicized students’ performance on Advanced Placement exams as part of its widely followed national high school rankings. This year, however, New York’s Education Department prevented the site from accessing this data on the state’s schools. Families and colleges, among others, are now left in the dark.

Barry Lam:

Barry Lam is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of “Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion.”

When I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, 25 years ago, I had a job in the counseling office checking students’ graduation requirements. Three of us, on a work-study wage, took about 10 or 15 minutes to serve each student who walked into the office. We’d match their transcripts with requirements and offer advice about which classes would be good for them to take in their last semesters in college.

For the last few years, Washington University in St. Louis has been working to get software to do the same job, integrating graduation requirements with enrollment, transcripts, and financial aid systems. It’s part of a software system that has cost the school $99 million to implement. At that price, the school could have hired 20 work-study students for well over a century. A faculty member at Wash U who is also a student adviser tells me that some students now need an hour to figure out if they have satisfied their major requirements, using a piece of the software so unwieldy that it requires ongoing mitigation, updates, and video training for staff, faculty, and students.

The public knows that the skyrocketing cost of higher education is to a large extent the result of skyrocketing administrative costs. But why is it so expensive to administer a college education? The answer lies in a particularly toxic combination of rules, mandates, and regulations — and the fact that schools are paying exorbitant amounts for the digital infrastructure to implement them.

Not only is this excessive administration helping to make higher education too expensive, but it’s stifling the development of some of the most important traits we want in college graduates: agency and autonomy.

Greg Toppo:

In her new book, Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools, Natasha Singer, a veteran business reporter for The New York Times, traces Big Tech’s bid to persuade schools to embrace their products, with industry-sponsored curricula and tools growing at astonishing speed. She also introduces readers to a group of educators and researchers fighting for a broader vision of computer science that looks beyond commercial digital tools.

A former health industry reporter, Singer sees parallels between Silicon Valley’s campaign for coding, among other measures, and Big Pharma’s influence on medicine, noting huge school investments over the past few years by Apple, Google and Microsoft, among others.

Cover of Natasha Singer’s new book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools

“Never has so much market power lined up behind a single curriculum cause,” she writes.

As a result, a movement that could have helped build data science or other less glamorous, evidence-based reforms has in many cases ended up offering students “only half an education in computing, the rosy upbeat half that casts tech giants as benevolent, world-changing innovators.” 

In one chapter, Singer examines a 2019 Advanced Placement Computer Science course developed by Apple that teaches students how to code in Swift, Apple’s programming language for building iPhone apps. It’s as if schools embraced a “Raytheon-branded AP physics course or DuPont chemistry course or Pfizer AP Biology course,” she writes.

Becky Jacobs:

This trend isn’t unique to Madison. Applications are up at colleges nationally, according to The New York Times. That’s partly because students can apply to more schools through a single method called the Common App. Plus, fewer schools require applicants to submit standardized test scores, the newspaper reported.

Both explanations apply to UW-Madison. The university started using the Common App a decade ago, and the vast majority of applicants now use that method, said Scott Owczarek, interim vice provost of enrollment management. Applicants can decide whether to submit their ACT or SAT score as part of their materials through spring 2028.

Owczarek said the university’s reputation nationally and internationally is another contributing factor. Time magazine recently ranked UW-Madison fourth among public universities in the nation and 23rd overall worldwide. Last year, UW-Madison rose to fifth place in a long-running national research ranking.

The university has also invested in recruiting students from across the state and beyond, Owczarek said.

Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Uthmeier in July issued a peremptory letter to Catholic bishops accusing them of violating Church doctrine and state law by requiring students to be immunized and not allowing parents who object to vaccines for religious reasons to opt out. There is “no legitimate religious reason” to deny religious exemptions, he wrote.

Thus sayeth the gospel of James Uthmeier. “As a Catholic, I am confident that the teachings of the Catholic Church do not require Catholic schools to compel students to take vaccines derived from the tissue of aborted children against the sincerely-held religious objections of their parents,” he asserted.

“Institutions run by the Catholic Church now threaten to place an undue burden on parents that would effectively deny them the fundamental right to choose a school that corresponds to their own convictions,” he added. Failure to allow religious exemptions “could jeopardize eligibility for state educational scholarship programs.”

He might have done Catholic bishops the courtesy of meeting with them to discuss the issue before posting his threatening letter on social media. Perhaps he thinks picking a public fight with the bishops is smart politics.

Theo Francis & Ray A. Smith:

What is just as remarkable is how different that is from the experience of job seekers who did graduate from college, says Gad Levanon, Burning Glass’s chief economist. For most of the past two decades, the two groups largely tracked each other, in good economic times and bad.

Now, though, just as job hunters without degrees are having one of their best runs, those with college educations are having one of their worst. And those with advanced degrees or in fields such as science and technology are having an even harder time than usual.

That divergence of fortunes is a departure from what the U.S. economy has seen for years, and much of it boils down to supply and demand: There aren’t enough skilled tradespeople to go around, for example, as older generations retire and immigration drops.

Meanwhile, more Americans have college degrees than ever, just as artificial intelligence is doing more of the entry-level work companies typically hire young graduates for.

“There’s a rapidly growing supply of people with a bachelor’s degree, and you have a rapid decline of people who don’t,” Levanon says. “I don’t think it’s a temporary thing.”

Wall Street Journal:

“If any staff member learns a student is transgender or gender non-conforming,” the document says, according to the lawsuit, “that information should be relayed to the school principal without delay.” The principal can discuss accommodations and schedule a meeting to go over pronouns and locker rooms. If the student doesn’t want to tell the parents, “that request will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis,” factoring in age, grade, welfare, “and any other relevant information.”

The Justice Department argues this violates two federal laws: First, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which requires schools to respect the ability of parents “to inspect and review the education records of their children.” Second, the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, which requires parental consent before a student submits to a “survey, analysis, or evaluation” on sensitive topics, including “sex behavior or attitudes.”

If the Justice Department has the authority to go after these bad policies, it could take some of the litigation burden from busy parents, who might not realize what schools are doing or the importance of objecting in advance. In the case that reached the Supreme Court, Mirabelli v. Bonta, one set of parents said they didn’t know that their daughter had changed genders at school until she attempted suicide.

The Kansas City district has denied breaking the law, and in a letter to the government last month, it offered a narrow interpretation of deception as a rare exception. “There are very few limited circumstances where a school district might, depending on the circumstances, not be able to notify the student’s parents,” it said, including if the student has already turned 18 or if there’s an active investigation into “abuse or neglect by the parent.”

DataRepublican (small r)

Between my husband and I, three of our parents were public-school teachers. Even the fourth one had worked, for a brief time, within the public school system. We had tremendous respect for the system itself.

I use past tense for a reason.

For twelve years we had assumed: we assumed that by being in a good school district, we would be safe from the decline of public education.

My son (“Bobby”) was an excellent student in elementary school, but had trouble adjusting to middle school. We decided to start touring the local private school, and was shocked at how far ahead they were of public schooling. The private school was mandating essays written in cursive by third grade, teaching algebra in sixth grade, and actually held students accountable from an early age on.

We realized we were failing our children as parents, and we had an emergency on our hands. We sent Bobby to be homeschooled by my parents for about six weeks, finishing out the remainder of his term learning cursive and sentence diagramming. Then we sent him to full time summer school at the private school, and hoped that would be enough.

One month before the year started, he took an admissions test. He was supposed to be entering seventh grade.

Bobby failed the admissions test.

He failed even the sixth grade placement, effectively putting him two years behind.

This was a blow to the entire family. Bobby cried and cried many tears over this – after all his hard work, and sacrificing a whole summer, he didn’t pass.

But the story has a happy ending. After six weeks, Bobby was able to pass the placement retest.

This is the story of how we used AI to fix two years’ worth of deficiencies in Saxon math and grammar.

———

Dissident Teacher:

I applaud this approach and have already used AI in this way.

But as a veteran public school teacher, I am here to tell you the public schools have zero incentive to accomplish this level of individuation for YOUR child.

Wendy:

There was little accountability, and certainly few life skills were being learned.

I also tutored many high school private school students who lacked life skills such as receiving feedback, goal setting, and independence.

Alpha is very different from traditional schools. Students are held accountable. They are asked to do hard things. They learn how to iterate, accept feedback, and try again after failing. They learn life skills that will matter in an ever changing world. It is intentionally different from traditional education.

Alpha begins the year with a “boot camp” which consists of minimal life skills that are expected of students. Throughout the year, the school builds on those foundational skills.

The bootcamp is necessary because many new students arrive from traditional schools that have not required them to practice things like public speaking, goal setting, financial literacy, and receiving feedback. For many new students, they are not used to failing or receiving feedback. So Alpha uses the first eight weeks to bring students up to speed.

Alpha measures life skills, and there is an assessment for each one. Not everyone passes the first time. But unlike in many traditional school settings, failure at Alpha does not mean, “Oh well, you’re just bad at public speaking.” It means: “What do we need to adjust so you can get there?”

James Barron:

There are 38 such tools that have A.I. components that will be altered or removed. But school leaders have not released the full list of apps.

…….

Once again, school leaders have not detailed how the screen time recommendations will be enforced. But it is safe to say that it will fall to the teachers. And enforcing the time limits will most likely be more difficult in middle school, where students can have multiple teachers. The teachers’ union has already said that it is concerned about how much of the new policies teachers will have to implement and oversee.

———

Blocking “ai” tools on student computers… Madison edition

A recent Madison School District Administrator presentation mentioned “application bloat”.

NYC and LA are restricting student AI. We used it to expose what school missed—and repair two years of gaps in six weeks.

Rachel Canter

For the past year, my phone hasn’t stopped ringing from callers wanting to learn more about how Mississippiimproved its public schools. 

Frustrated by sagging reading and math scores, educators, advocates and lawmakers across the country are curious about reforms that transformed Mississippi from a national punchline into a leader in reading and math proficiency—policies I spent much of my career championing.

Democrats, however, don’t often ask me how to replicate Mississippi’s success; they ask if it’s possible at all, given the power of teachers’ unions in their home states. As one audience member skeptically asked me at a recent panel discussion: “You’ve done your work in a red state. Do you really think blue states can do this?”

My answer is unequivocally yes, even if blue-state politics may make Mississippi-style reforms harder to pass. 

If helping kids to read and do math at grade level is the goal, the evidence shows that what we’ve been doing in schools across the country for the last 12 or so years hasn’t worked. Children have lost so much ground, they not only know less than their counterparts did a decade ago; older children know as little as they have this century. 

More.

———

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Tyler Cowen:

college is a great place to make friends, date, and possibly meet a spouse. Those features are ever more important as America suffers a crisis of loneliness. Furthermore, if you think that artificial intelligence may displace a lot of jobs, or just reduce work hours, marrying well will become more important. The title of the new essay by Clara Collier says it all: “After Work, We’ll Have Each Other.” You are also going to live longer, so think hard about who you wish to spend that time with.

The data show that college-educated people are more likely to marry, and to stay married. More generally, college-educated folks have superior social indicators of all kinds, including resistance to alcohol, drug, and gambling addiction. (Charles Murray wrote a whole book on this theme, called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.)

If you have a bachelor’s degree and are over 25 years of age, your chance of being married is 64 percent. If you have only a high school degree, your odds of being married are an even 50 percent.

For divorce, the results are more dramatic yet. The chance of a woman remaining married for at least 20 years is 78 percent if she went to college, but 41 percent if she is only a high school graduate. For men, the gradient is less sharp though still significant—namely, 65 percent versus 47 percent.

People who finished college also have more extensive networks of friends. For instance they are twice as likely to have six or more close friends, and less than half as likely to have no close friends at all.

Wilson, Samuel

Introduction

Claims about the value and benefits of diversity^Footnote 1have proliferated in recent decades, becoming a contemporary secular credo that animates the spirit of almost all elite institutions of the English-speaking world. Consider, for example, President Bill Clinton’s proclamation, in his State of the Union Address, that “we must never, ever believe that our diversity is a weakness—it is our greatest strength” (Clinton, 1997). Nowadays, such contentions about the value and benefits of diversity—what we refer to as the “Diversity Hypothesis”—are commonplace, even axiomatic.

However, in contemplating the meaning and effects of diversity, it is important to note that ‘diversity’ is not a single fixed concept but something that can be understood in two distinct ways. For instance, as argued by Mogilski et al. (2025), diversity can refer to diversity in demographic makeup and identity, with an emphasis on including underrepresented groups within positions of power, or it can refer to diversity of perspective.

In the context of workplaces and fields of inquiry, the contexts most relevant to the present review, the Diversity Hypothesis is arguably manifest most prominently in the cognitive or informational Diversity Hypothesis (Mello & Rentsch, 2015) that posits that teams whose members vary in terms of their perspectives, thinking styles, knowledge, skills, values, and beliefs (i.e., diversity of perspective or viewpoint) are more likely to generate unique ideas and find more creative solutions to complex problems than homogenous teams. Consistent with this, popular science writers such as Scott E. Page (2007, 2019) contend that groups of people with diverse perspectives, heuristics and interpretations systematically outperform groups composed of the “best” individual performers, with additional claims that this viewpoint diversity ultimately stems from identity diversity (e.g., demographic differences, such as gender and race).

——-

Ian Kimgsbury:

Nicholas Kristof: “Research suggests” diverse teams outperform groups of the best individual problem-solvers.

A new review finds scant evidence for that claim.

Turns out Kristof’s diversity science is about as credible as his Israeli rape-dog story.

Nakylah Carter, Jeffrey S. Solochek:

The big story: Florida is one of 24 states, including Washington D.C., that currently funds K-12 tutoring directly, according to a new review published today by Stanford University. 

The university’s third annual National Student Support Accelerator looks throughout the nation to analyze how states support high-impact tutoring and the policies and funding they have in place for it.

High-impact tutoring is an immersive form of tutoring based on relationship building and individualized instruction known to improve education outcomes and even school attendance, according to lead author of the brief Kathy Bendheim.

“Our mission is to accelerate access to high-impact tutoring to students in need,” Bendheim said. 

Of the 18 states that ran competitive tutoring grant programs last school year, Florida was one of the 17 that kept them going this year.

The Florida Legislature established the Florida Tutoring Advantage program in 2024 and which is administered by the University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning. In last school year alone, the review detailed the state funded $22 million toward the program, including $2 million for AI-enhanced learning support. 

Seventy-three percent of districts throughout the state participated in the program last school year that served more than 46,000 students. This year, the state appropriation sits at $14 million.

Simon Briole Julia Cage Andrea Prat:

Despite unprecedented access to information in the digital age, young citizens face growing challenges related to news consumption and misinformation. This large-scale randomized controlled trial examines the impact of two complementary interventions designed to foster media literacy and the consumption of high-quality news among high-school students, implemented in France over the 2024-25 academic year. The study involves 243 high schools (for a total number of 9,628 students), randomly assigned to a control group or to receive one or both of the following interventions: (i) a one-year free digital subscription to the leading national newspaper, and (ii) media education modules implemented by teachers. Exploiting unique data on students’ actual online news consumption, we document a very large uptake of the free subscription, which translates into persistent and large increases in news consumption (+0.49 to 0.60 sd) and demand for future news, including an 8pp increase in paid subscriptions nearly a year after the intervention. We also observe a 0.20 to 0.31 sd increase in news knowledge for students enrolled in deprived schools, reducing baseline information inequality by 45-70%. Finally, we show that both free news access and media education improve media literacy skills (+0.08 to 0.26 sd), with larger effects among students taught by teachers with prior experience in media education.

MJ Slaby:

After roughly six years, IPS changed its grading policy to make it possible for students to receive a zero. However, students have multiple opportunities before that happens.

Indianapolis Public School students can receive a zero on assignments again, but only if they make zero effort to complete them.

The IPS school board updated the district’s grading policy to remove the district’s no-zero grading policy for students in first through 12th grade in a unanimous vote on Thursday.

The change comes about six years after the no-zero policy was implemented and is largely due to teacher feedback, said Lela Simmons, IPS chief learning officer, during the school board’s agenda review session on Tuesday.

Now, students can receive a zero on an assignment if they make no attempt to complete it after getting multiple opportunities and support from the teacher. How that works is up to the teachers and will depend on the student and their grade level, Simmons said.

If students make a good faith effort, they will earn at least 50%, Simmons said. Anything 59% or lower is an F, while other letter grades are about 10 points each. For example, anything 90% or higher is an A and grades between 80% and 89% are a B. Earning at least 50% on an assignment makes it more likely students will pass the class.

She said the aim is to continue to give students opportunities to do better and try again.

The no-zero policy was approved in July 2020 and meant that the lowest score students could receive was 50%.

“The intention of that shift was because it is incredibly hard for students to come back from zeros in their grades,” Simmons said.

She said the change was also in response to the COVID-19 pandemic which led to students learning virtually and missing assignments for related reasons such as quarantine.

Joseph Cox:

Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity and other data, then feed that intelligence to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime, but which the government thinks may be worth searching, 404 Media has found.

The units, the name of which 404 Media is revealing here for the first time, are called Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT). In one case, a PITT analyzed the financial activity of a man who was driving across Montana, and local authorities stopped him under the pretense of an obstructed license plate and charged him with a DUI. 

404 Media identified one PITT in the Spokane Sector, Washington, which polices the U.S. border with Canada, and another in the Laredo Sector, Texas, which polices the border with Mexico. The findings add to an Associated Press investigation from last year which found Border Patrol was using automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program. 

Beth McMurtrie:

A calculus class may not be the first place you’d think to find oral exams. But Robin Pemantle is a longtime fan. A math professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Pemantle believes that having conversations with students about math is a uniquely valuable way to assess what they have learned and how they think.

by  Alex Tabarrok

A regulation that raises gasoline prices makes people angry but when regulation prevents an industry from ever existing, most people never learn what they lost.

Consider nuclear power. Overnight construction costs for early U.S. demonstration reactors fell 81 percent between 1954 and 1968. For reactors begun between 1967 and 1972, costs rose 187 percent. The 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision and then the reaction to Three Mile Island in 1979 accelerated the cost increases and slowed construction even more. Note the order. The turn was underway years before the accident that everyone blames for it.

What might have happened had the earlier learning and deployment trends continued? Peter Lang’s 2017 paper in Energiesestimates that nuclear power would have cost about one-tenth as much by 2015. The additional generation could have avoided as many as 9.5 million premature deaths.

The number is staggering even if quartered. Millions of deaths. Yet, the graveyard was both invisible and silent.

(Furthermore, climate change would not be a problem today had nuclear power not been handicapped.)

The nuclear story you probably know but Niko McCarty has an excellent new Works in Progress piece on an invisible graveyard of technology that I knew almost nothing about.

In the 1980s, officials decided to regulate engineered microbes under the Toxic Substances Control Act, a law written for industrial chemicals. Microbes swap genes all the time, but EPA treats them as “new” whenever DNA is introduced from another genus. As a result, even a marker gene used simply to identify successfully edited cells can trigger review if it remains in the organism. McCarty reports that researchers filed more than 240 applications between 1987 and 2018: “Only a few were ever approved for widespread use.”

What have we lost? We can’t know for sure but among the plausible losses McCarty discusses are engineered bacteria that detect buried explosives, microbes that extract rare-earth metals and improved plastic-digesting enzymes. Similarly, Chernia et al.write:

David Deavel:

That essay, arguing for the existential necessity of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, was widely criticized on both left and right. Yet the arguments it made and the images it galvanized were also widely credited with helping propel Donald Trump into the White House. Ten years later, those arguments are still worth looking at.

The central argument of Anton’s essay was evident from the title. Like those passengers on Flight 93 who realized what was going on with their plane on September 11, 2001, and decided to storm the cockpit to stop their plane from being used as a weapon against the nation, Americans had a duty to stop Clinton from winning the 2016 presidential election.

Cal tech Mathathon

AI has made groundbreaking progress in pure math in the past few months:

• May 20, 2026: Erdos’s planar unit-distance conjecture was disproved (open 80 years)^[1].
• August 1, 2026: The first explicit non-sofic group was constructed (open 27 years)^[2].
• August 23, 2026: The six-sphere was shown to admit a complex structure (open 78 years; unverified)^[3].

This AI advancement raises the following questions: (a) How much can AI speed up the process from ideation to peer-reviewed publication? (b) What is the role of a mathematician when AI can solve conjectures faster?

We are assembling the top math talent worldwide to answer these questions. On October 30th, a hundred teams will be given frontier models to solve open conjectures and build new mathematical theories. Then, they will defend their results before leading mathematicians, who will assess their understanding of the results.

Jed Kolko

This summer marks the worst period for US statistical integrity since President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last August. Two different and seemingly uncoordinated events at the Census Bureau raised alarms about inappropriate political encroachment on the scientific and technical authority of the agency.

I take some comfort that journalists and independent experts spoke up quickly and loudly. I still trust the economic indicators we get from the expert staff at Census and other US government statistical agencies, like inflation data and the jobs report. But I am scrutinizing any technical changes more closely and am quicker to look for political influence.

During this administration, the statistical system has suffered attrition, leadership vacancies, cuts, delays, and political interventions in methods and content. Most of these developments are the result of collateral damage rather than intentional harm. But the examples of deliberate political intervention have grown, including these latest events at Census.

These two events—the publication of a brief on the official Census platform about noncitizen voting that fell far short of Census standards and a political decision about privacy-protection methods—are new harms. The main impact is likely to be on demographic data for voting and redistricting, and on local demographic and economic data. The headline-worthy macroeconomic data that policymakers, financial markets, and the media follow closely were spared this time around. But damage to any part of the statistical system reverberates throughout the system. These events demonstrate that the Census Bureau and other agencies are increasingly vulnerable to political interference that would harm their credibility and the ability of businesses and policymakers to make the data-driven decisions that affect Americans’ daily lives.

The noncitizen voting brief

Wall Street Journal:

More than 85,000 students from 895 school districts have confirmed they’ll use a state-funded scholarship toward private school or home-school expenses in the coming year, according to a report this month by Texas Comptroller Don Huffines. Some 68,000, or 80%, are in households making 200% or less of the federal poverty level. That’s $66,000 for a family of four.

Another 17,300 students are in households between 200% and 500% of the poverty threshold, meaning no more than $165,000 for a family of four. More than 20,000 students, or about 25%, also have a disability. This outcome is by design: The law gives priority to children with disabilities and lower incomes, and a $1 billion funding cap means the program won’t reach other tiers of applicants.

The figures are incomplete, since only about 70% of the students offered funding had finalized their participation by the report’s Aug. 1 deadline. Depending on how many families with lower incomes decide not to take a scholarship after all, more funds may flow to higher tiers. After the report’s release, Mr. Huffines said the state had offered money to another 15,000 students between 200% and 500% of poverty.

Still, the report is a helpful look at where the taxpayer’s money is going. Scholarship amounts are modest: $2,000 for home-schoolers or up to $10,474 to attend a private school, which is 85% of the usual per-pupil funding. Children with disabilities can qualify for more.

FIRE:

• 62,000+ Students Surveyed
• 250+ Colleges Ranked

The most comprehensive guide to free speech on campus — anywhere

The University of Chicago ranks 1 out of 261 schools in the 2027 College Free Speech Rankings with a score of 81 and a B- speech climate grade.

UChicago ranks first nationally on “Administrative Support,” showing strong trust in officials to defend speech. It lands in the top 25 for “Political Tolerance,” indicating comparatively greater student willingness to host controversial speakers, and “Openness,” meaning fewer contentious topics feel off-limits. The data shows no bottom 50 weaknesses.

The University of Chicago authored the original Chicago Statement and the Kalven Report on institutional neutrality. The school earns a “green light” Spotlight rating. UChicago should respond clearly and forcefully to defend free speech whenever censorship occurs or is demanded. Doing so will demonstrate the university’s commitment to free speech and build community trust that the administration will defend expressive rights.

Jonathan Kay:

In April, Memorial University—the only university in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador—posted five job openings for prestigious Canada Research Chair (CRC) professorships. In all five cases, it was specified explicitly that able-bodied white men need not apply. Rather, the jobs were reserved for members of “equity groups, including women; 2SLGBTQIA+ people; Indigenous peoples; racialised persons; and persons with disabilities.” 

Following the uproar, Memorial administrators refused to apologise or back down. Instead, they explained that universities across Canada were all doing the same thing (even if they weren’t so blatant about it)—since any school seeking to get Canada Research Chair funding from the federal government must demonstrate that they are tearing down “systemic barriers in academic hiring.”  

Memorial University isn’t wrong. As a group of researchers led by University of Buckingham professor Eric Kaufmann details in a new report published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Canada’s $300-million-per-year Canada Research Chairs program restricts disbursements to universities that hit aggressive affirmative-action targets set by government officials.

Wall Street Journal

A new report finds a lot of critical theory and not much of the basics.

Children learn a great deal about race and gender in schools these days, but not nearly enough about reading and math. A big reason is the colleges that teach the teachers, and a new report forthcoming Wednesday brings more insight into how they promote politics instead of the basics of instruction.

The evidence comes from Daniel Buck of the American Enterprise Institute, who examined syllabi for programs at eight public graduate schools of education across five states. For each school he analyzed one master’s or certification program that “aligned most closely with an elementary teaching degree,” he writes, not programs that are “overtly political.”

———

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

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

2026-2027 Madison K-12 $pending continues to grow, fueled by a 9.7% (!) property tax increase. Total spending will be at least $706,000,000 for 25,003 students, or $28,236 per student.

May 2026 Madison School District Presentation: 7,095 adults for 25,003 students (3.52 students per adult!)

2024-2025 Early Literacy Screener Map.

Map: Foundations of Reading Results: 2015–2024

Where have all the students gone?

More. Act 20.

3,887 Madison 4 year old to third grade students scored lower than 75% of the students in the national comparison group.

“application bloat”

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average k-12 tax & $pending. This despite our long term, disastrous reading results. May, 2026: 7,095 Staff for 25,003 students; $pending > $26k per student!

Madison Schools: More $, No Accountability

The taxpayer funded Madison School District long used Reading Recovery…

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

A.B.T.: “Ain’t been taught.”

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?

Alex Bronzini-Vender:

The academic-dishonesty crisis is well documented. When the Harvard Crimson surveyed undergraduates this spring, nearly 40 percent copped to using AI “in ways their instructor may view as inappropriate or against class policy.” Now, schools are scrambling to catch up. Princeton and Oberlin — institutions that have long prided themselves on faith in undergraduates’ morality — are ending the tradition of unsupervised exams. The University of Chicago’s social-sciences division is banning all technology from classrooms in required courses.

But as some faculty move to restrict devices, many administrators are betting on something else: better tech. When California State University system schools upgraded their contracts with Turnitin, a plagiarism-detection giant, campuses paid an additional fee for a tool that scans essays for AI. Columbia University’s Teachers College recommends educators use Draftback, a Chrome extension that lets professors replay a Google doc’s entire revision history. Other institutions have GPTZero, a program that promises to find AI-powered plagiarism with “99 percent accuracy.”

Despite all this, as the fourth academic year of AI college begins, students keep finding innovative ways to skirt the rules. Just a year before Jared’s friend pitted an LLM against WebAssign, agentic coding tools couldn’t yet reverse-engineer the weaknesses in professors’ grading platforms, much less build bespoke software to exploit them. But in the spring of 2025, a new class of AI tools became available to the public. Unlike mere chatbots, newer models can plan multistep tasks, call on external tools like web search and code execution, and carry out complex assignments — from building slide decks to writing and running code — with minimal human supervision.

The Economist

VERY THREE years the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries, releases the results of international school tests sat by 15-year-olds all across the world. There were reasons to hope that the latest data, published on September 8th, would bring positive news. Marks in mathematics, reading and science had collapsed in the previous round of testing, which was carried out just after the pandemic. Policymakers dared hope that, with the calamity well in the past, grades might start to rebound.

That is not what happened. On the contrary, in rich countries—the primary focus of the tests—scores have fallen further (see chart 1). In literacy, the decline is actually speeding up. These data suggest that there are long-running factors pushing down achievement in schools, and that without swift correction, pupils’ abilities could yet plumb further depths. Anyone who cares about the young of today—and the economies of tomorrow—ought to be alarmed.

The OECD’s project, known as PISA, takes a measure of young people’s aptitudes as they approach the end of their compulsory school days. The number of school systems taking part has expanded over the years: the latest tests were sat in all 38 OECD member-countries and in 53 other places (many of them developing economies). The results are used to create an international league table of sorts.

This year, as in almost every round since 2000, Asian school systems rule the roost. Children in China—taking part for the first time since 2018—have wiped the floor with almost everyone else (though scores there are skewed because the tests are sat in only four rich provinces). In science and maths they score 100 points above the average for OECD countries (as a broad rule of thumb, 20 points is considered to be about as much as an average pupil gains in a full year of learning). Kids in Singapore, Macau, Taiwan and Japan follow behind.

Estonia still looks the best school system in the West. Turkey is rising very fast. And there is heartening news for Britain, whose youngsters now rank inside the world’s top ten in all three disciplines. Compared with three years ago, Britain has pushed up its science results and held reading and mathematics broadly steady. That counts as a good result when many others are heading down.

———

PISA 2025 Results (Volume I) “Future-Ready Students”: OECD

Megan Brenan:

Story Highlights

• 32% of Americans satisfied with the quality of U.S. K-12 education
• K-12 schools rated worst on teaching critical thinking skills
• Record-low 66% of K-12 parents satisfied with child’s education

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ satisfaction with the quality of K-12 education in the U.S. has slipped to 32%, a new low in Gallup’s 27-year trend and down 11 percentage points over the past two years. At the same time, dissatisfaction has risen to a record high of 67%.

Satisfaction has averaged 44% since 1999. After peaking at 53% in 2004, it has only been above 50% once, at 51% in 2019.

Overall, 8% of U.S. adults are completely satisfied and 24% somewhat satisfied with the quality of K-12 education, while 36% are somewhat dissatisfied and 31% completely dissatisfied. These findings are from an Aug. 3-24 Walton Family Foundation/Gallup telephone poll.

Currently, 35% of Democrats, 32% of independents and 25% of Republicans are completely or somewhat satisfied with K-12 education. Democrats’ and independents’ satisfaction levels are record lows by three points and one point, respectively. Republicans’ satisfaction was lower only in 2023, during the Biden administration.

Although Democrats have often expressed higher satisfaction than Republicans with K-12 education dating back to 1999, Democrats are largely driving the recent drops in satisfaction. Since 2024, satisfaction among Democrats has fallen by 19 points, including by seven points over the past year, while independents’ satisfaction is down 10 points and Republicans’ is down six points.

Nimah Gobir

View the full episode transcript.

When Los Angeles parent Lila Byock’s son started middle school, his grades suddenly collapsed.

It didn’t make sense. “He’d always been a bright, curious, engaged kid who did really well in school,” Byock said. She and her husband were confused and concerned.

Teachers assured the family that their son understood the material and the problem wasn’t academics. “They said, ‘He just can’t stay on task on his iPad,’” she continued.

That answer surprised Byock. Like many parents, she assumed that after pandemic remote learning ended, classrooms had largely returned to face-to-face instruction. Instead, she learned her son was spending much of his school day on a district-issued device.

“He was scrolling YouTube Shorts during math class. He was playing Fortnite battles with classmates during class,” Byock said. Other students watched streaming shows during lunch on school-issued iPads, and one student even showed pornography on a school device, according to Byock.

After talking with her son, Byock realized he wasn’t trying to break rules, but rather, he felt trapped by distractions he couldn’t seem to resist. “It was eroding his self-esteem,” she said. “He told us, ‘I want to stop, and I don’t think I can.’”

When Byock asked school administrators how devices were being used and what safeguards existed, the school’s answers didn’t satisfy her.